Structural words and turns of phrase are used as social signals that carry key information about the relationship between the parties involved in a discussion.
The Twitter API Wiki has one of the most practical explanations I’ve seen of some of the issues involving Unicode normalization.
Innovation means a new way of doing something. At least, it used to mean that. Now, it apparently means a different way of doing something.
Our formal attempts at understanding language tend to be hierachically structured, but when it comes to actually organizing language, it is well known that meaning is relational and constantly fluctuates.…
From time to time we take our pen in hand And scribble symbols on a blank white sheet. Their meaning is at everyone's command; It is a game whose rules…
Inside the mind of an English speaking machine.
Why do we call programming languages “languages”? What is missing from the literary traditions of programming?
Several friends recently introduced me to a game (which we later found out wasn't new as we thought). It's very simple to play: pick two Wikipedia articles, and try to jump from the first to the…
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",…
As the English language evolves and morphs, there is considerable tension between retaining the humble apostrophe and getting rid of it altogether.
“After enduring sloppy punctuation on the street sign outside his home for more than a year, Stefan Gatward could stand it no longer.”
For many years, Object Oriented discourse has been far too constrained by language oriented thinking.
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…