• Google Code doctype : Documenting the open web
  Doctype is a Google-sponsored open encyclopedia and reference library for developers of web applications. By web developers, for web developers.
  (tags: google code documentation)
• XML: The Angle Bracket Tax [Coding Horror]
  “I don’t necessarily think XML sucks, but the mindless, blanket application of XML as a dessert topping and a floor wax certainly does. Like all tools, it’s a question of how you use it.”
  (tags: xml yaml)
• Yay! Facebook to Launch Jabber/XMPP Support for Chat [The Unofficial Facebook Blog]
  XMPP will allow developers to integrate chat within their applications both internally and externally to Facebook. And is also obviously great news for wider adoption of XMPP.
  (tags: facebook xmpp)
• Microformats and accessibility - a request for help - do people who use screen readers turn on the abbreviation expanision? [BBC - Radio Labs]
  If you don’t know what this is about it’s the use of the HTML abbreviation element to add machine friendly data to pages so that human friendly data is enclosed in abbreviation tags and machine friendly data is added to the abbreviation title attribute.
  (tags: accessibility bbc microformats)

Here are the slides from my recent presentation at XTech on our work on the BBC Programmes Ontology.

I’ve also written a post over at the BBC’s Radio Lab blog about the machine readable serializations to represent the concepts described within the ontology.

We have been following the Linked Data approach - namely thinking of URIs as more than just locations for documents. Instead using them to identify anything, from a particular person to a particular programme. These resources in-turn have representations, which can be machine-processable (through the use of RDF, Microformats, RDFa, etc.), and these representations can hold links towards further web resources, allowing agents to jump from one dataset to another.

more…

There are also details about how to get your hands on XML, JSON and YAML serializations of the schedule views and RDF serializations of the objects (episode, series and programme brand).

We would really welcome feedback on what we’ve done - especially the RDF views which are still in development.

• Chris Messina’s thoughts on DataPortability [FactoryCity]
  A very thoughtful post about the pros and cons of dataportability.org Data Portability is giving people a brand to rally around but there are risks including an unrealistic, naive or incomplete model of privacy.
  (tags: dataportability openid oauth)
• BBC - Radio Labs - We’re Playing Your Song: Personalised Track Notifications over XMPP
  “Just a little XMPP toy: send the message lastfm yourlastfmusername to radio1@hug.hellomatty.com and we’ll ping you when one of our music stations is playing a tune by an artist you like to listen to. Fun, huh?”
  (tags: apml bbc last.fm xmpp)
• Creating a Team Working Agreement [Chris Sterling]
  These might include:
  - Time and location of scrum; Testing Strategy
  - Build and infrastructure plans
  - Team norms
  - How to address bugs
  - Product Owner avilibility
  - Capacity plan for initial sprint
  (tags: agile scrum projectmanagement)

I’ve just posted a piece on my thoughts about the first couple of days at last weeks XTech over at the BBC’s Internet blog.

As David Recordon of Six Apart noted in Wednesday morning’s plenary, open software and hardware have become hip and have given small groups of developers the chance to build interesting web apps - and, more importantly, the chance to get them adopted. This is a new wave of web companies which expose their data via APIs and consume others’ APIs. And what is interesting about these companies is that they are converging on common standards - in particular, OAuth and OpenID.”

more…

There was a lot on data portability and Semantic Web stuff (including our presentation on the Programme’s Ontology) both of which I’m really pleased to report are getting some practical adoption. And as with the Social Graph Foo Camp XMPP appears to be to an important emergent technology. I just hope it can scale.

Photo: 19th February 2005, by Paul Watson. Used under licence.

The closing keynote at XTech 2008 saw Sean McGrath discussing “Orang utans, Oxen and Ogham Stones“. The central premiss of the presentation is that as the web becomes more dynamic so more and more of the data is only accessible when its requested - and this can mean that its inaccessible to machines and therefore the rest of the web. There are no persistent documents.

Sean argued that we have three models operating on the web.

• Model A is the platonic model. Documents (already) exist on the server - you simple request them over HTTP.
• Model B has documents existing on the server but are dynamically rendered transforming the content in the process using, for example, CSS and JavaScript.
• Model C has nothing existing until you observe it. The document is composed and rendered when requested - Just In Time programmatic generation of content.

Model C is Turing complete, user-sensitive, location-sensitive and device-sensitive and model C is winning at least on the client side with Ajax, Flash, Silverlight and Air. It’s now relatively common when viewing the source of pages and see no actual content, just JavaScript to generate the content.

So does this matter? Sean thinks so yes. He fears that this data is siloed, trapped within the code and not accessible via addressable URIs. And if we lose URIs and hypertext then we also lose deep linking - and what about search engines? Will the Googlebot download that JavaScript and eval it to spider it? And what about everyone else? URLs are great for wombling - they can be bookmarked, tagged and mashed-up.

If Sean is right then rather than the web being made up of documents with some code (as it once was) we will be left with a web of few documents and lots of applications. A Web which is really just HTTP.

But is this all true? I’m not so sure.

Sure there has been a rise in the use of client side scripting to dynamically render content (notably with the rise of Ajax web apps) and there are plenty of server side applications delivering dynamic content - but I don’t think we should be worried about server side apps, as long as they are well designed.

It seems to me that we have three classes of webpage:

• Resources - individual objects, which if designed well live quite happily at persistent URLs;
• Aggregations - listings and groupings of those resources;
• Web apps - pages that let users manipulate resources.

So for example even though the BBC Programmes is rendered dynamically (from a server side application) the resources are found at persistent URLs and the pages contain lots of lovely, semantic, mark-up (there are are also plenty of aggregations). Whereas Flickr uses Picnik a client side photo editing application to let Flickr users edit their photos.

Is this a problem? I don’t think so, no. After all, as Sean noted there’s no such thing as a resource only a representation of one. And this is the best you can ever get - the web is made up of URIs and HTTP. We just need to be careful not to lose sight of the importance of URIs.

Photo: good ol days, by emdot. Used under licence.

• Jeremy Keith considers what makes data open and accessible [adactio]
  “The more and varied the formats in which you can access data, the more accessible that data is. I realise that this flies in the face of programming principle of DRY: Don’t Repeat Yourself. But really, you can never have too much data.”
  (tags: accessibility http)
• Two conversations about tests and software development [anarchogeek]
  If tests are written, and they are relevant to the the functionality of the application, the code base stays smaller, faster, and is more maintainable. But figuring how to help people continue writing tests is what’s really important.
  (tags: testing rails)
• Flying, swimming robot jellyfish [newscientist]
  The swimming and flying robot jellyfish are being shown off at the Hannover Trade Fair this week by industrial automation company Festo.

  Very Cool

  (tags: robotics jellyfish)
• ID Selector - makes OpenID sign-in process easier [idselector]
  A drop-in piece of JavaScript, it’s unobtrusive and allows users to sign in using common OpenID providers
  (tags: openid)
• Mediawiki API [wikipedia via Simon Willison]
  The API is still underdevelopment none the less it all looks very shinny.
  (tags: api wikipedia)
• Yahoo’s social networking strategy: world domination [arstechnica]
  This is mainly about unifying their 500M user accounts into a centralized profile management system plus allowing users to build their own apps using Google’s OpenSocial and Yahoo’s forthcoming Application Platform. If they get this right is will be huge.
  (tags: yahoo strategy socialnetworking)

• Andrew Hinton’s presentation on Linkosophy at the IA Summit [SlideShare]
  A good presentation considering how the web has evolved and how good IA can help users can create connections and give context to the document they are reading.
  (tags: ia design)
• Designing your API - lessons from Twitter and Digg [SlideShare]
  A look at the principles behind developing a RESTful API and beyond. The bottom line is you need to atomize your information into addressable resources and makes those resources permanently addressable.

  You know it makes sense.

  (tags: api rest twitter digg)
• Content page design best practices - Luck Wroblewski’s a presentaiton at IA Summit [luckw.com]
  Favor visual hierarchy over site hierarchy because users don’t navigate your site, they navigate from one document to another so give them clues and help them find contextual content. Most sites get this wrong and focus on the site’s context not the users
  (tags: design ia usability webdesign)

• BBC joins the OpenID Foundation [bbc internet blog]
  This is seriously good news for the wider adoption of OpenID in terms of publicity and giving the technology a less geeky face but letting people use their existing OpenID accounts will really help drive adoption. Lets hope it works out.
  (tags: bbc openid dataportability)
• Great idea for hardware hack: One laptop per hampster [xkcd]
  I would dearly love someone I know to build this. Actually I wish I had the skills to build it myself but that’s another story.
  (tags: robot xkcd)
• If you’re interested here’s the database schema for BBC Programmes
  Some clues to some of the upcoming features on /programmes.
  (tags: bbc programmes schema)
• Cool parallax scrolling to create a psuedo-3D effect [Vitamin via whomwah]
  Very cool effect and all with css.
  (tags: code css design)

• A very generous write up of Nick and Patrick’s Semantic Web workshop [Tom Heath]
  “Perhaps as a publicly-funded organisation the BBC is obliged to be a good citizen of the Web of Data. I don’t get that impression I’m left with the feeling that this is a result of a bunch of guys really getting the Web of Data.”
  (tags: bbc SemanticWeb)
• Encyclopedia Britannica gives free access to online publishers and bloggers [Britannica WebShare]
  They’ve obviously realised that everyone is using Wikipedia. But will they keep it free access? If they make it a subscription service in a year or two then all the links will be effectively broken, lets hope they don’t.
  (tags: britannica blogging)
• A list of the bible’s greatest massacres - its a jolly good job we’ve got religion for moral guidance where would we be without it? [via Kottke.org]
  At number 1: Elisha (with help from God) sent two bears to kill 42 children for making fun of his bald head and; at number eight Elijah killed 450 religious leaders in a prayer contest.
  (tags: atheism christianity)
• Cool URIs for the Semantic Web [w3c]
  “Web documents have always been addressed with URIs. This is useful because it means we can easily make RDF statements about Web pages, but also dangerous because we can easily mix up Web pages and the things, or resources, described on the page.”
  (tags: HTTP SemanticWeb w3c url)

• Resourceful Vs Hackable Search URLs [Morethanseven]
  A nice article considering the design of RESTful URL including a look at including search strings in URLs.
  (tags: URL REST)
• Being Digital: Michael’s fanzine to Nicholas Negroponte’s take on the need for TV producers to provide data about their programmes [BBC Radio Labs]
  “Therefore, we need those bits that describe the narrative with key words, data about the content, and forward and backward references.”
  (tags: data programmes tv)
• Jeremy Paxman on user generated content [Etre]
  Dan’s recent post on Monocle.com comes to mind “A more progressive approach [was] to ensure that everything is linkable… encouraging people to point to articles from their own sites… this seemed a more mature approach to handling this brand”
  (tags: ucg, paxman)