rowid,new_id,clean_paragraph
1,1-0,passage: The Web Standards project has launched Phase II.
2,2-0,"passage: Blogging isn't nearly as easy as it looks. After several days hacking around in PHP (I'm far too proud to use an off the shelf solution) I find myself confronted with a blank slate, and writers block has taken hold. The toughest thing is working out what style to use in blog entries - my previous writing for the web has been primarily on forums (where posts do not have to stand on their own) or news sites where a formal, unopinionated tone is required. A blog should be informal but informative, with each post hopefully adding a new angle to the topic in hand. I'm sure it will get easier as I go along..."
3,4-0,"passage: Netscape 4 hit 5 years old yesterday. Scott Andrew celebrated this monumental occasion with a poetic tombstone tribute, entitled ""1997 - 2002"". The challenge now is to make this dream a reality - NS4 still has a stronghold in many corporate and institutional IT departments, as Zeldman bemoans in the first ""opinion"" of the new Web Standards project. An opinion that is notable in its absence of a permalink ;)"
4,5-0,"passage: One useful resource that did come out of the discussion was a link to Matthew Haughey's excellent tutorial on writing effective mailing list emails, which pays particular attention to the best way of quoting other posts."
5,5-1,"passage: The Webdesign-L mailing list is ablaze with a huge, rambling, flamey thread about the relaunched Web Standards project. As with so many flames it has become quite difficut to work out what is being argued over and why (an issue compounded by the emergence of sub threads on everything from US law to how to upset a Canadian). I would provide links, but the list does not maintain a web accessible archive."
6,5-2,"passage: I've been running my own campaign for web standards over on the WPWM forums with relatively unimpressive results. 
This advocacy thing is harder than it looks."
7,5-3,passage: Steven Champeon of WaSP has been using the thread to set a few things straight. A major point of confusion that has been resolved is that web standards does NOT mean CSS layouts. To quote Steven:
8,5-4,"passage: What I'm wondering is this: when did the WaSP ever say anything about
tableless sites? I've been part of the group since the beginning, and
I don't *ever* recall us making any noise about tables. Some /members/
of the group, myself included, have certainly done so, because it's a
Good Idea, but it's never been part of the WaSP's mission."
9,6-0,"passage: Day 3: Bill - Mark Pilgrim's ""30 days to a more accessible weblog"" series continues with the story of Bill, a retired military officer with a physical disability who surfs the web on an old Linux laptop and runs a mailing list on Veteran's rights. The piece also clarifies that the characters profiled are fictional (call me naive but I wasn't sure if they were based on real people or not). I can't wait to see where Mark is going with this - 3 days in and he has already built up some beautifully observed case studies and it will be fascinating to see what he does with them. I'm also intrigued as to how he can make his blog any more accessible - his current accessibility statement demonstrates a far higher level of understanding than any other site I've yet seen on the web."
10,7-0,"passage: I think this is an excellent idea, but then like Scott Johnson I like the idea of doing the right thing. I've mailed my note of support to amazon@fuzzygroup.com. If this takes off in a big way it could really demonstrate the power of the humble blog."
11,7-1,"passage: Spotted over at FuzzyBlog: If I Was Jeff Bezos of Amazon and I wanted to do the Right Thing, Here's What I'd Do. In a nutshell, Scott Johnson suggests  that Amazon set up a free (or very low cost) system for charities to gather donations through Amazon's payment system - a charitable version of PayPal. Why Amazon? They have a good reputation, a well implemented payment system  and a massive user base. The more convenient the system the more likely people are to donate."
12,8-0,"passage: The amazing tree generator (via webgraphics, who in turn got it from CSS Discuss). This is just the kind of DHTML I really like. Place a simple nested unordered list in your document and this external javascript can use the DOM to convert the list in to a hierarchical outline style tree, with each node expandable to show the child members. It looks great and works in both IE and Mozilla - I haven't tested it in other browsers but it should degrade gracefully, leaving them with a static nested list."
13,9-0,"passage: Mozilla 1.1 Alpha was released yesterday, and after reading Scott Andrew's recommendation (especially with respect to the mail client) I decided to give it a go. I found the ability to turn off images in mail eventually - it's hidden away in Edit->Preferences->Privacy & Security->Images as opposed to Mail & News preferences where I looked for it first."
14,9-1,"passage: The features that made it worthwhile for me was the welcome return of the site navigation bar. Mozilla can once again take advantage of <link> tags in HTML documents, adding an additional toolbar with previous/next buttons and other useful options. The feature was pulled from Mozilla 1.0 for performance reasons, but it's back in 1.1 and useful as ever. I was pleased to see that it picks up on Mark Pilgrim's RSS alternative version link, listing the RSS version under ""Other Versions"". Useful information about getting your site to take advantage of this feature can be found here - looks like I've got some work to do..."
15,10-0,"passage: Some of his points seem overly picky, in particular the content-type issue. I checked a site Hixie mentions as sending the correct text/xml content-type header in NS4 and, as I suspected, NS4 popped up a ""download"" box and failed to render the page. I also checked out the W3's XHTML home page  - XHTML1.0 strict and a content-type header of text/html. His other points seem worth thinking about, but I would not consider any of them to significantly dilute WaSP's message."
16,10-1,"passage: So respect to Hixie for taking on the mantle of the ultimate standards advocate, but you can take a good thing too far."
17,10-2,"passage: Hixie has been poking around the new Web Standards Project site, and he is not impressed. His analysis of the site makes interesting reading, with complaints including CSS colour and background not being set at the same time and the content-type of the document being set as ""text/html"" rather than the more correct ""text/xml"" required for XHTML documents."
18,11-0,passage: The message may not be diluted... I simply think it is very bad form for a group that is claiming to champion the standards to be making any mistakes at all on their site.
19,11-1,"passage: If by serving content with a text/html header I can create pages in future-proof, easily parsable XHTML and have them accessible to virtually every browser ever release, XHTML it shall be. Then when browser support catches up I'll be ready, and so will my websites."
20,11-2,"passage: I can't disagree there (and I hope they correct some of the problems with the site). As for the content-type header issue, Hixie's stance is that using XHTML at this time is inappropriate due to a lack of proper browser support. He's probably right on that as well, but that leaves us with the question ""When CAN we start using XHTML?"". The browser upgrade cycle for an average net user is horrific, hence the continuing relevance of the five year old Netscape 4. It could be another five years before browsers that support XHTML properly are dominant enough for  it to be worth while."
21,11-3,passage: Hixie has replied to my previous post (and provided my first ever link in the process).
22,12-0,passage: I'm not too interested in marketing but the idea of sharing knowledge to improve ideas is the principle reason I started this blog.
23,12-1,"passage: More FuzzyBlog stuff. Scott runs one of my favourite blogs - constantly updated, plenty of interesting new content and most of it fits the areas I am interested in. Today's items that caught my eye are Why Do I Blog So Much? and Very, Very Practical Tips for the Busy Person : Part 2 (actually posted on Monday, find Part 1 here.). I particularly liked the following quote from ""Why Do I Blog So Much?"":"
24,12-2,"passage: Blogging is a superb knowledge capture tool [...]  I use my blog to capture my marketing ideas because if we are to grow, others need to know this.  The interaction I get from sharing them with the world only improves them."
25,13-0,passage: Thanks for the educational exchange Hixie :)
26,13-1,"passage: Hixie has answered my question. Judging by how long it took IE to support CSS1, he estimates 6 years until XHTML is ready for main stream use. He's almost certainly right, but I'm going to try to stick with XHTML any way (bandwagon jumping can be fun). He also points out that this site does not validate - I checked the original template but it seems that several of the entries I have added have inadvertantly invalidated the page, mainly through unescaped ampersands and the like. Time to add an automatic ""validation"" system to my administrative tools - it's a shame the W3 validator isn't available as a web service."
27,14-0,passage: I validate again.
28,15-0,"passage: I don't know how I missed this, but the PHP group have released an alpha version of PHP with the Zend Engine 2 (tarball / Windows binary). This is exciting stuff - the new scripting engine has vastly improved object support and brand new exception handling, something I've wanted in PHP for a long time. The CHANGELOG lists the new features and provides sample code. Here's a summary:"
29,15-1,"passage: It's all good, but it comes with a hefty warning against using the alpha on even semi-production web sites. Personally I can't wait for a deployable version."
30,16-0,passage: Eric Raymond: Sex Tips for Geeks :)
31,17-0,"passage: Mark Pilgrim's set of case studies is beginning to shape together. I've been following responses to it through his ""Further reading on today's posts"" referral tracking tool - reception has been overwhelmingly positive, with almost universal praise for Mark's decision to use the case study format to drive home his point. kcalder criticised  Mark's suggestion that colour blind users wouldn't get much out of images on the web, and Mark has apologised and altered the case study accordingly. SubAverage called Mark ""preachy"" and posted a parody (mentioned in passing by Dave Winer). All this and we're only on day 4."
32,18-0,passage: Dane Carlson: Blog to be added to the Oxford English Dictionary.
33,19-0,"passage: I'm itching to get an XML-RPC interface to this blog up and running so I can start playing with blogging tools (or roll my own in PythonCard).  It looks like Dave Winer's MetaWeblog API is just what I need. It describes an XML-RPC interface with 3 methods: metaWeblog.newPost, metaWeblog.editPost and metaWeblog.getPost. More importantly, the standard supports complete flexibility in the data that is sent along with the request. My entries consist of a body, an optional permalink (one is generated if none is specified), optional categories and an optional search string for a ""Google It!"" link if one is required. The MetaWeblog API looks ideally suited to handling this, and is fully extensible should I change the format of my entries in the future."
34,20-0,"passage: While I applaud his aims and greatly look forward to the series, I can't help but feel that limiting the series to just bloggers is an unnecessary move. I expect most of the tips to be applicable to a wide array of sites and the web is crying out for a good resource for improving general site accessibility. I'm sure Mark's series will be fantastic, but I would love to see it aimed at a larger target audience."
35,20-1,passage: Over at diveintomark Mark Pilgrim has explained the aims of his Accessibility series:
36,20-2,"passage: This series is entitled ""30 days to a more accessible weblog"", and it will answer two questions. The first question is ""Why should I make my weblog more accessible?"" If you do not have a weblog, this series is not for you. The second question is ""How can I make my weblog more accessible?"" If you are not convinced by the first answer, you will not be interested in the second."
37,20-3,"passage: He is planning a five week series of tips for creating an accessible weblog, with a new tip each day. The tips will be explained in such a way that even bloggers with no experience of HTML will be able to understand and implement them."
38,21-0,passage: Owen Briggs: CSS Panic Guide. Owen is the author of several excellent CSS resources (including Box Lessons and 264 font size screenshots) and this is his collection of links to CSS resources from all around the web. It covers every CSS reference worth knowing about and is an essential bookmark for anyone interested in using CSS for layouts.
39,22-0,"passage: So, if anyone reads this who I know from Uni and haven't personally had a chance to say goodbye to: Have a fantastic summer and I'll see you in September, if not before."
40,22-1,"passage: Well, I've reached the end of my first year at Bath University (studying a degree in Computer Science) and I can safely say I've never had 9 months go so fast. I've had a fantastic time - I met the girl of my dreams, made a whole bunch of great friends, did loads of cool things and spent far too much money. Today I move out of halls (a terrifying prospect when you live on the ninth floor and the lift is playing up). As an aside, I also lose my lovely fast net connection and return to the trauma of 56K. Thank goodness for Mozilla and tab based browsing."
41,23-0,"passage: This site has been here for less than four days yet it already shows up as the top result if you search for simon willison on Google - and I never even submitted the URL. In fact, asking Google to list pages that link to me currently turns up zero results. Spooky."
42,24-0,"passage: Meg Hourihan: What We're Doing When We Blog. It's a curious fact of blogdom that many bloggers blog blogging - why they do it, what it is and why it's so important. I feel Meg has nailed it with this article - blogging is defined by the format, not by the subject matter. She also makes some insightful comments about why the blogging format works so well:"
43,24-1,"passage: Freed from the constraints of the printed page (or any concept of ""page""), an author can now blog a short thought that previously would have gone unwritten. The weblog's post unit liberates the writer from word count."
44,25-0,"passage: Via Daily Python-URL (which appears not to provide permalinks): Introduction to Python iterators. This is an extract from Deitel & Deitel's ""Python How To Program"" and includes extensive code samples. Iterators are very cool - as I see it, they allow you to overload an object ready for use with Python's powerful for ... in ... syntax (as well as other looping methods). This blog is implemented as an object in PHP - had I used Python I could display the whole blog using for entry in blog: print entry."
45,26-0,"passage: But touch my words, use them as jumping points for third-party sponsorships?  There'd better be a check in the mail for me."
46,26-1,"passage: Scott Andrew LePera in a mail to Webdesign-L (sent on the 12th of June, I'm catching up on my mailing list folders):"
47,26-2,passage: What I learned from the smart tags issue:
48,26-3,"passage: Etiquette question: What is accepted etiquette for posting quotes from mailing list material?  Webdesign-L does not maintain publically accessible archives anywhere, but is a veritable gold mine of information. Should I consider everything on the list as fair game to be blogged whenever it takes my interest (obviously maintaining credit to the original writer) or should I contact authors for permission first? No comments system yet, so see my contact page if you have a reply."
49,27-0,"passage: The example requires Mozilla 1.0, as do many of the other css/edge demos. The site has some fantastic experiments on it (all with full explanations and freely available source code) and is well worth exploring."
50,27-1,"passage: New example on Eric Meyer's css/edge: Pure CSS Menus. This is very impressive stuff - it's an implementation of those dropdown menus where you hover over an item and a new menu pops up, but it's done in pure CSS without a line of javascript. Even better, the markup for the menu is a nested unordered list, so browsers that don't support the advanced CSS needed will still display the menu in a meaningful way."
51,28-0,passage: rudy on thelist pointed me to this handy List of User Agents.
52,29-0,"passage: Brent Ashley: JSRS2.1 Released (from June 10th - Internet Archive copy). JSRS is Javascript Remote Scripting, an incredibly powerful javascript library that allows DHTML pages to communicate with a web server without having to reload the page. This latest version fixes POST suport for Mozilla. The library opens the way for a whole host of interactive web applications without the normal limitations caused by the request-and-response nature of the web. Best of all, JSRS is cross platform (at least for Mozilla, NS4+ and IE4+)."
53,29-1,"passage: Brent actually has two implementations available. JSRS uses DHTML elements (such as hidden iframes) to make RPC calls to the server, while RSLite is an ultra lightweight version that uses cookies for communication (and even works on Opera!). Both implementations are free and come with source code, as well as example server side implementations in a variety of languages including ASP and PHP."
54,30-0,"passage: Meg Hourihan's explanation of blogging (which I linked to and praised earlier) is stirring up something of a storm. Meg's suggestion that the key to blogging is the format has been ripped to pieces by the likes of BurningBird, Jonathan Delacour and Stavros. Jonathan uses photography as an analogy - some photographers are excellent technically and concentrate on taking the perfect photograph while losing sight of the art of the medium. I hope I'm not overquoting, but Jonathan clinched his argument for me with the following:"
55,30-1,"passage: I notice Jonathan, BurningBird and Stavros are all on the faculty of AKMA's University of Blogaria. I wonder if they are accepting undergraduates."
56,30-2,"passage: As a new blogger I am still trying to come to terms with the format and how it works. I think this is why I was initialy so impressed with what Meg had to say - she described blogging in technical terms that made sense to the logical part of my mind. My opinion has been reversed thanks to the interlinked nature of the blogging community, which lead me to opposing viewpoints and helped dramatically improve my understanding of what it is to blog."
57,30-3,"passage: To focus attention on the magic and mystery of blogging. To acknowledge (paraphrasing Burningbird) that the key to weblogging is people, not a format. To admit that -five years on- we're only just starting to realize what might be possible. To stress the communal nature of the activity. To celebrate the amplification of meaning that occurs when smart, creative people collaborate. To invite newcomers to join a grand adventure, a networked version of Hesse's Journey to the East."
58,30-4,"passage: Which is not to say there's no place for an explanation of the mechanics of weblogging: tools, posts, links, time-stamps, permalinks... But wouldn't it be better to leave those prosaic details for later? And to start by mapping out an imaginative vision of the medium's potential?"
59,31-0,"passage: Anil Dash provides a copy of Amazon's home page in HTML 4.0 Transitional, and it validates. Solid proof that you can rewrite a complex ecommerce site in valid HTML, and another victory for the web standards movement."
60,32-0,passage: I wonder if Paul Sowden has finished his exams yet.
61,33-0,"passage: With launch notices on both glish and Signal vs. Noise I just had to check out MEETUP. I was not dissapointed. MEETUP is a beautifully simple concept that has been superbly executed. It aims to arrange real life get togethers around the world of people with similar interests. You simply find a topic that interests you and see when the next scheduled meetup for that topic in your area is, then enter your email address to have the site update you on the status of the meetup and remind you nearer the time. Meetup participants vote on the venue (from a list of over 11,000 suggested spots) and the rest is up to them. Why MEETUP?"
62,33-1,passage: Well worth checking out.
63,34-0,"passage: Meg has replied to Jonathan's criticism of her piece  on the nature of blogging via his site's comments system. She defends her original viewpoint, commenting on blogging that we can't define this thing based on the content we're outputting. It looks like this debate still has quite a bit of life left in it."
64,35-0,passage: The ideal alternative would be for the W3C to create a web service back end for their validator so blogging software can check the validity of new entries automatically.
65,35-1,"passage: Thinking about it, almost all of the common errors I am experiencing come from the XML parser rather than the rules governing XHTML. I need an XML parser that examines each post as (or before) it is added to the blog and checks for well-formedness. Expat (used in PHP for event based XML parsing) does not validate documents against a DTD but it DOES die with an error if an XML document is malformed. It looks like it could be just what I need."
66,35-2,passage: The road to validity is frought with peril. I've just fixed another small group of errors that were preventing this page from validating (after spotting the ominous W3C validator in today's user-agent logs). This time is was a couple of forgotten </p> tags and an unescaped ampersand.
67,35-3,"passage: There has to be a technological way of helping avoid these errors. Originally I wanted to be able to edit my entries in some kind of specialised markup language (such as WikiText or UBBCode) that the blogging sofftware could convert into valid XHTML, but I quickly realised that the most flexible markup language for blog entries is XHTML itself thanks to the built in support for everything from quotes to lists and code samples."
68,36-0,"passage: I've been looking at PHP's XML handling functions (in particular the xml_parse() function) and I've suddenly realised the advantages of writing entries in valid XHTML. Before I started this blog one of the features I considered adding was something that can pull all of the links out of an entry when it is submitted and index them or add them to a directory somewhere. I was preparing myself for some regular expression hacking, but thanks to XHTML this is now completely unnecessary. All I need to do is define a couple of handlers to deal with <a> tags and Expat will do the hard work for me. In fact, this approach gives me a great deal of flexibility in what I do with my entries. I can extract quotes and blockquotes, pick up on emphasized text and generally allow my blog software to ""understand"" my entries as and when I add them. The true benefits of XHTML have suddenly become clear."
69,37-0,passage: That the series is aimed at webloggers rather than a more general web audience seems OK. Better to start with a defined target audience and trust that the story will ripple out from there.
70,37-1,"passage: Jonathan also links to How to Disagree Agreeably, or at least Effectively, an insightful collection of quotes related to the article title."
71,37-2,passage: Jonathan has meta-blogged (I think that's the term) responses to Mark Pilgrim's accessiblity series. He replies to my query about the wisdom of limiting the series to bloggers rather than expanding it to cover as much as possible:
72,37-3,"passage: That makes sense, but I stand by my opinion that the web is in desperate need of a good quality resource on general site accessibility. Sounds like something for WaSP's ""learn"" section to think about. I plan to compile a set of links to general accessibility resources once Mark has finished his tutorial series."
73,38-0,"passage: Apparently the University of Blogaria was founded on the principle that the ideal university would have no students to contaminate the educational process (Jonathan Delacour). The only way in is to earn a position on the faculty, which no doubt requires slightly more than four days of blogging. Thank goodness their courses (or at least the benefits of their wisdom) are freely available to all."
74,39-0,"passage: New toy: XWT, the XML Windowing Toolkit. This is one impressive piece of open source software. It allows you to create a graphical user interface using relatively simple XML markup (with ECMAScript to define interactivity). Your application can then be executed using a browser plugin, implemented as an ActiveX component on IE and a Java applet everywhere else. The idea is not to write whole applications in XWT, but to create server side applications and provide a client side GUI using the toolkit. Both SOAP and XML-RPC are supported for communicating between client and server."
75,39-1,"passage: The demos on the site are very impressive (although slow over a modem) and the technology is at a stage in development where it is ready for deployment. For more information, check out the project's FAQ."
76,40-0,"passage: Elm0 has suggested a solution to my XHTML validation woes in a thread on WMHub. He suggests using libxml to validate new entries against a DTD, via PHP's exec() function. It looks like xmllint is just the command line tool I need - if only I could get it to compile on the University server. I'm getting ""out of space"" errors which is strange as I have over 10MB left on my account, so I'll assume for the moment that it's a problem with the server and try again in a few days."
77,41-0,"passage: Micah S Sittig on css-discuss has created an alternative version of the new Yahoo site design using CSS for layout instead of tables. The aim of the excercise was to demonstrate how much code can be saved by using CSS, and this has been achieved admirably with a 60% reduction in overall page size. The new version was developed for Mozilla 1.1 and looks great in that browser, but fails to render quite as well in IE. Still, as a demonstration of the file size benefits that come with CSS it works fantastically well. A full overview of the project alogn with file size statistics and implementation details is available here."
78,42-0,passage: I've also changed the front page to only display entries from the last three days. All older entries can be accessed through the archive.
79,42-1,"passage: I've just finished rebuilding the main data file for this blog, after it became corrupted last night due to a ""Disk Quota Exceeded"" error. It looks like this was my fault - I inadvertantly filled up my disk space when I was playing around with libxml and PHP choked when it tried to save the latest update to my blog. Luckily no data was permanently lost as the archives are cached as flat files, which allowed me to rebuild the data file from scratch."
80,43-0,"passage: I currently use <hr> tags on this blog in between every article, but I have used CSS to prevent them from displaying. This is to ensure that browsers which do not interpret my stylesheet (such as Netscape 4) will still display some kind of divider between entries."
81,43-1,"passage: Interesting thread today on css-discuss about styling <hr> elements. I had tried this before with no luck, but the thread provided some useful tips. Marek Prokop provided this tutorial, and Kevin W responded with these tips on styling <hr> in Opera. Michael Guitton suggested that setting  width: 100%; could help fix problems with Netscape 6."
82,44-0,passage: Mark Pilgrim starts his series of weblog accessibility tips today with tutorial on adding a doctype to a blog.
83,45-0,"passage: Boston.com, via Slashdot: Online search engine AlltheWeb claims bigger index than Google. I was under the impression that the 2,073,418,204 quoted on Google's home page is no longer accurate (it hasn't changed in months, and I know Google have been adding things to their index). I had a play with AllTheWeb and it turned up some decent results for my test queries, but it seems to load slightly slower than Google. Further discussion on this can be found over at WebmasterWorld, which  is also home to the best Google discussion forum I've ever seen."
84,46-0,"passage: Food for thought: Joel Spolsky on the economics of Open Source software. Joel starts by explaining the economic concept of complements - products that complement your product so that if their price goes down, demand for your product increases. He then goes on to demonstrate how this concept explains the decision of several large companies (including IBM, Sun and HP) to financially support open source software. As is usual for Joel on Software the article makes fascinating reading."
85,47-0,"passage: More CSS layout fun courtesy of Webdesign-L. This time Steve Clay has taken Anil Dash's standards compliant Amazon  and reworked it to use CSS for layout. Unfortunately it is likely to be a while before a major ecommerce site or portal decides to go with a CSS layout simply because of the continuing relevance of Netscape 4 users, but these examples demonstrate how close we are to being able to leave the era of nested table designs behind us."
86,48-0,"passage: Concentrating on implementation sounds like a great idea - there are several accessibility resources explaining concepts but I haven't seen any that explain how accessibility can be achieved, especially by web content creators who are not HTML experts."
87,48-1,passage: Mark mailed me in response to my query about limiting his accessibility series to weblogs rather than expanding it to cover general sites:
88,48-2,"passage: 
Because every project needs to start and end somewhere.  There are
disabilities I'm not covering at all.  There are certainly more than 25 things
that *every* site should implement.  And so forth.  Focusing on weblogs lets me
delve deeper into specifics about implementation.  This is already apparent in
day 6 -- talking about the specific templates in each weblogging system that you
need to check -- and it will become even more important later on.  Many of the
standard arguments against accessibility (my client doesn't want it, it's too
expensive, the site needs to look exactly like the brochure) don't apply to
weblogs, so I will use that to my advantage."
89,49-0,"passage: Minimal XML is a project of SML-DEV, who describe themselves as a group of over 125 XML experts working to create simple XML standards and to simplify existing XML."
90,49-1,"passage: Minimal XML is a subset of XML 1.0; including features essential for data interchange applications, and excluding non-essential features that are arcane, legacy-related, problematic for data interchange applications, or redundant."
91,50-0,"passage: New buzzword (at least for me) - Knowledge Management. Apparently this is a theoretical corner stone of content management, an area I'm very interested in. Plenty of information about it in DMOZ as well."
92,51-0,passage: Peter Van Dijck: Email interface design 101 - a short article examining the possibilities of using email interfaces for web applications. This is an interesting topic and one that deserves further exploration. I am particularly interested in the security problems faced when building this kind of interface (something that is not covered by Peter's article) - how can you effectively secure an email interface? I'm guessing that for true security the only real solution is PGP encrypted mail and some kind of password driven authentication system. Peter's blog carries a discussion on the article.
93,52-0,"passage: From Google Answers via Elegant Hack: The tale of the suicidal chipmunk. On a related note, I saw chipmunks on sale at a farmer's show (the Bath and West) a few weeks ago for ten pounds each - very cute but I have no idea if they'd make good pets."
94,53-0,passage: phpDocumentor version 1.1.0rc2 has been released over at www.phpdoc.org. The feature list (from their press release):
95,53-1,passage: The full Changelog is also available. This looks like a very useful piece of software.
96,54-0,"passage: Via thelist: Javascript Selectbox Functions. Extremely useful demonstrations of how multi-line selectboxes can be used to create advanced user interface widgets with javascript, including tools to alter the order of items in a list and pass values from one selectbox to another and back again."
97,55-0,passage: Mark also points out this handy list of ISO639 language codes.
98,55-1,passage: Mark Pilgrim's accessiblity series continues: Day 7: Identifying your language. Since I'm using XHTML 1.0 I've changed my opening <html> tag to the following:
99,56-0,"passage: I've signed up for a new mailing list (probably not a good idea, I'm getting over 200 mails a day which isn't much fun on a modem) - XHTML-L, which describes itself as A forum for discussing XHTML issues for both XML and HTML developers. The list is adminned by Simon St. Laurent, who coincidentally is involved with the SIG-XML project I mentioned earlier today."
100,57-0,passage: Python advocacy doesn't get much better than this.