maetl

Html

A quick and dirty language...

For quick and dirty programs... Paul Graham has released an early version of Arc, his ongoing project to develop a Lisp dialect suiting a minimalist taste in programming style. Never one to shirk…

Google Web Authoring Survey

Google have released a bunch of high level statistics from a recent survey (SVG capable browser required), looking at the relative frequency of HTML elements across more than a billion web documents.…

Zen and the Art of Template Engines

Without exception, programmers espouse separation of logic and display as an ideal principle. In practice, however, programmers and template engine producers are loath to enforce separation, fearing…

On Semantic HTML

Having slogged through the trenches on some pretty large scale HTML and CSS builds, I tend to have a somewhat jaundiced view of declarative syntax. There’s only so many hundreds of hours you…

Extracting Tabular Data from HTML Tables

Despite having been a significant catalyst for the success of the world-wide-web, use of the humble 'ol <table> has been drived to the backroads with current conventions…

Closed Social

Antisocial Networking couldn't have popped up at a better time for me, as I was actually sitting here, struggling with nascent suspicions about the nature of the XFN microformat. I've been designing…

Google and Link Relationships

Google is based on the concept of the web as a gigantic directed graph. Edges in this graph are determined by directional hyperlinks between web pages. How many of us understand how the usage of rel…

How Microformats are Different

In response to More Thoughts on How Microformats are Different, I'm starting to wonder if maybe there is room for another proper noun that describes "a specific compound of semantic XHTML units",…

NZ: Remote Tagging and Reverse Relationships

In Remote Tagging: A Richer Social Model, Stowe Boyd describes an addition to the RelTag microformat that allows shared tags themselves to be embedded in the link.…

Resource Dissonance Format

Recently, I've been looking for good case studies of the practical benefits of RDF adoption, and while I've found a little interesting stuff, I've been noticing a severe dissonance in the volume of…

XHTML Design Patterns

The key concept that underlies the modern web is the separation of presentation and structure, and recently, there has been a lot of interest in documenting the synthesis of human friendly and…

Entity Relational Diagrams in HTML

This is a prototype of a language modelling tool, created for the purpose of helping designers, information architects, and developers collaborate better. If you want to check it out, and have access…

Mixing Semantic Vocabularies and Basic English

Microformats make sense to me immediately, in a way that RDF never has. By focusing on visible data, the markup retains a high degree of interoperability with existing…