Internet Alchemy

WAPAW.COM hit 2000 pages indexed today. The actual volume of content is much larger because WML splits each page up into a number of cards which are like pages within pages. There are also nearly 800 pages with bad XML which is a bit disappointing. By the way, we’re not indexing sample content provided for developers. These pages are all real content produced by people like the BBC.

Crane Softwrights have a freely downloadable tutorial on using XSLT available at their site. It’s in a 2 up format but most printers should cope with it. Other versions are for sale at the site.

A new IETF working group has been set up to produce a DNS-based method of mapping telephone numbers to attributes such as URLs for devices such as pagers, faxes and modems. If implemented properly this could be very exciting. Imagine looking up my WAP phone in a directory to discover whether I can accept email or instant messaging or even whether I’m running a web server on it. This kind of information is already within the scope of DNS but most people (understandably) don’t advertise what services are running on their servers. With devices it’s a different story - I want you to know that my phone can handle faxes and voice mail.

Got this link via Cam. Reading the article he points to, I can honestly say that I haven’t heard of any of those slang terms. Not a single one. That either means I’m a sad bloke who doesn’t meet enough real people or the author of the slang book just made up a whole slew of words to make a quick buck. Don’t bother adding your comments to this one, I think I can guess the answer.

If you’re doing development with IIS and Index Server then this article might be of interest. It’s a step by step tutorial on accessing Index Server using ADO which lets you do things like dynamically generating search queries or querying more than one corpus.

Microsoft have released Service Pack 6 for NT. Top of the list are 4 year 2000 bug fixes. It’s November on Monday. Two months to go until the year 2000 and we still don’t have a compliant version of NT.

Matthew Gertner has written a well thought out piece describing why schemas are going to be important for widespread adoption of XML. The basic thread is that schemas simplify things for the end user by enabling tools to become smarter. He dismisses RDF along the way, but in my opinion RDF is never something you’d want to write by hand, it’s
better generated from a database. But, the whole point of the article rings very true, XML will never succeed unless it is kept simple, and that applies to the tools needed to create it as well.

The Big Idea is that HTML beat SGML to a pulp in the market because it is so damned simple. The XML 1.0 Recommendation does an outstanding job of preserving the elegance of SGML while eliminating countless optional features whose complexity outweighed their benefit. Now it is up to the XML Schema WG to complete the picture; if they can follow the lead of the original XML authors, its future may be very bright indeed. But let’s not forget that we aren’t quite there yet.

WebReview have a couple of new features about RSS. The first, Why Would You Use RSS?, suggests some uses for RSS, although this paragraph puzzles me:

It should come as no surprise, then, that Userland and O’Reilly are very interested in the future of RSS and syndication, and that we’re working together with the community of developers that has grown around RSS to build on this technology. Netscape is still the de-facto maintainer of the specification, but many developers would like to move RSS beyond its current applications.

Makes me wonder who really wrote the article. The more interesting of the two is RSS Delivers the XML Promise which describes the parts of an RSS channel and how to write them.

It’s good to know that Dave Winer can spot a good idea when he sees it. But if he’d looked at StartsHere closer he would have realised that he could have created a custom channel that does the same as this site. It would have saved him a whole lot of time. That’s the power of a serious aggregator like StartsHere, you can create you own personalised aggregate channels that only show the news you want to see. And you can view the channels however you want - as HTML, RSS (for programs like Carmen’s Headline Viewer) or WML on your phone/PDA.

The New York post is reporting that a group of online magazines, including
Feed, Suck and the Smoking Gun are about to
be bought out by Lycos Ventures to create a new media network. Good luck to them.