bill.cava.us » web

San Francisco Gilbane Conference

bill — Sat, 31 Mar 2007 16:42:46 +0000

I will be in San Francisco in two weeks (April 10 – 13) at The Gilbane Conference San Francisco and will be speaking on a panel “Web 2.0 Technologies.” My presentation “Watching the Web Take Shape” focuses on emerging trends in structured content delivery in the browser. How does this relate to Web 2.0? Over the past few years, Iâ€™ve noticed a number of interesting trends that point to a web that incorporates structure in the browser a more significant way than we’ve seen before. Although its not at the forefront of the Web 2.0 discussion, in many ways it provides the underpinnings for things like mashups and social networks.

The State of Web Dev: An Exciting Time

bill — Fri, 06 Oct 2006 13:09:59 +0000

Over at ektron, we worked withÂ SitePointÂ on a survey of 5,000 web developers titledÂ The State of the Web Development 2006/2007Â (25-page free preview). The goal was to conduct the most comprehensive study to date of the web developer community. The results are available and show not only the state of the industry, but also some interesting trends. A number of bloggers are already commenting and extrapolating.

My personal favorite:Â Â

Ryan StewardÂ at ZDNet: “We’re in the middle of an exciting time. People are getting very creative about their content – how they want it, where they want it, and what they want to do with it. The technologies are finally here to turn some of those thoughts into tangible solutions.”

Microformats: breathing life into web content

bill — Fri, 26 May 2006 13:51:24 +0000

An interesting conversation came up at work around embedding XML documents into web pages using namespaces, and in my opinion, the conversation entirely underscored why microformats make sense. Since the late 90â€™s, there have been many efforts to standardize the way information is described using XML. While these definitions have been useful for many applications, their usefulness typically fails to translate to the web for a couple of reasons.

Case-in-point, look at MathML. The first version was designed by a W3 committee in 1999. It has been used successfully in many applications. Yet even after seven years, the popular version of Internet Explorer still requires a third-party plug-in to view it. This means, if an organization wants to store math related content as MathML, yet wants to publish it in a web format supported by major browsers, it must first transform the MathML into something browser-friendly like a PNG or GIF.

This scenario points out two of the bigger problems with XML on the web:

Web applications often fail to deliver content retaining the structure found implicitly in XML and databases. Rather, web applications typically take structured data and transform it into web friendly (unstructured) formats like HTML and GIF.
Web applications that deliver structured contentÂ typically rely on browsers having the capability to display it. For example, in order for MathML to properly display in a web browser, it must have support it out of the box (such as FireFox), or have a plug-in (like Internet Explorer).

Why are these problems worth overcoming? Look at Google. Its search algorithm exploited one of the few bits of structured data available in plain-vanilla HTML, the hyperlink. Give programs the ability to easily extract meaning from a web page and you get something indistinguishable from magic.

Microformats stand as a possible solution to these problems. They leverage the existing popularity of XML based web-friendly formats such as XHTML and RSS and do so in a way that makes the technology accessible to the average web developer knowing only HTML and CSS.

With microformats, data is both structured and web friendly at once. So instead of embedding XML documents within anÂ web page, consider the benefits ofÂ hiding them.

A monolog, a dialog, a catalog

bill — Fri, 28 Apr 2006 19:24:10 +0000

At Gilbane San Francisco this week, I was asked what the differences between a blog, a discussion board, and a wiki are. The title pretty much gives away where the discussion wentâ€¦ but here was the thought process:

Although a blog facilitates a conversation through trackbacks, in many instances a blog serves as a soap box for a monolog. Personally, comments do not to seem to be crucial to many of the blog sites I visit.
A discussion board facilitates dialog between visitors.
A wiki facilitates creation of a catalog of information gathered across visitors.

For many of the people that came by, this metaphor seemed to help clarify things. It focuses on the mode of communication and can easily be conceptualized.