maetl

Xml

Method Missing?

Builder is a completely declarative library which makes it easy to generate XML from a cascade of Ruby method calls. But it's not completely smooth sending: working on an Atom feed, I ran into a…

I really thought it was over

But it's not... Yet the author of this new RSS 3 spec has made a more-than-insignificant oversight: he's missed the fact that RSS 3 already exists and it's a f**king joke... Aaron Swartz certainly…

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…

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…

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…

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…