There looks to be the beginnings of an interesting flamewar discussion of the relative merits of Rails vs. Django over at news.ycombinator.com.
Monthly Archive for August, 2007
Confession: I don’t actually read Slashdot any more. There — I said it. I’m sorry. I want to say that I am faithful to that venerable institution that is Slashdot, but I simply don’t have the time.
I do like to follow “what’s going on” on the web/tech bleeding edge, though. Have I switched to Digg, Reddit, HackerNews, the New York Times Technology section? No, no, maybe, and no.
I’ve found the best way to see what’s going on, what’s new, what’s interesting, is to just put the feed to http://del.icio.us/popular into my Google Reader.
All that is a preamble to the title of the post. If you follow the sort of things that appear in del.icio.us/popular (or Digg… or Reddit… or Some Other Webby News Place), you tend to find a lot of lists. That’s okay; lists can be nice. They can be a genuinely handy reference, a good way to separate the wheat from the chaff in a given search, motivating, and informative.
If you also follow the sort of blogs you might call metablogs — blogs about blogging, and usually about increasing traffic ergo Making More Money — you will have seen that “list posts” have acquired a vaunted status as a sort of Uber Link Bait. People like “list posts,” they link to them, they bookmark them, they may even rave about them and revisit them many times. For good reason — as I said, a good list of links, instructions, or ideas can be genuinely useful.
That being said — increasingly you find blogs that seem to be made up almost exclusively by lists. Smashing Magazine comes to mind; Mashable is becoming increasingly so (though they do still have Actual Content).
This morning I came across this on del.icio.us/popular: Firefox God: 300+ tools and resources for Firefox.
300? PLUS??
That seems a little excessive. When a list of tips, tools or resources grows to 300… is it still really useful? Maybe. Maybe not. I don’t know… I do know that when I do a Google search, I rarely look past the first page of results — there’s just too many, and I expect the information I need to be in the top ten or twenty results. When I look at a list, I am looking for something I can digest quickly; show me five, ten, maybe twenty items.
Maybe I’m old fashioned; maybe I’m unrealistic. Maybe lists of 300 items have their place as a resource, if they are well-organized and if they are not just random samplings, but well-considered selections. Maybe lists like that are why Mashable reportedly earns $166,000 per month, and this blog earns only a few dollars. I’m not trying to slam Mashable, list posts in general, A-list-type blogs, linkbaiting, or anything like that. I’m sure I’ve written a list or two in the past, and will probably write more — given the statistics, maybe I should be.
Sometimes, though, the mass of these information-stuffed articles just seems like noise.
You may have heard of yaml (rhymes with Camel). Yaml is used in Rails config files; as it’s very own Recursive Acronym states, it is not mark up language. The Literature describes it as
“a straightforward machine parsable data serialization format designed for human readability and interaction with scripting languages such as Perl and Python.”
Very nice.
However, now there is also YAML (also, rhymes with Camel?). YAML is
an (X)HTML/CSS framework for creating modern and flexible floated layouts.
Despite the naming confusion, the latter YAML looks like a nifty toolkit. CSS layout is notoriously tricky, thanks mostly to Our Friends In Redmond And Their Ubiquitous Browser. Anything that speeds/eases the process is definitely a good thing. It is free to use under a Creative Commons license which requires that “a backlink to the YAML homepage (http://www.yaml.de) in a suitable place (e.g.: footer of the website or in the imprint)” be placed. For those who would rather not include such a thing, a commercial license is available.
YAML is fairly complex, if only because it aims to be a general, flexible solution for CSS layout, and CSS layout can be complicated; ergo, YAML has a bit of a learning curve. Until I try it, I’m not yet sure that it’s worthwhile… though, it does look like it has a good collection of the various IE hacks, and reading the YAML documentation may well remind you of all the various cross-browser “gotchas” you need to avoid when creating a CSS layout.
ScribeMedia.org has a lot of excellent video content, not least of which a collection of talks from last years Railsconf. Here, for example, is David Heinemeier Hansson’s keynote.
The whole thing is interesting; but, a great quote? Certainly; at about 5:40 into the first segment, David says,
I don’t really think Rails currently is … in a position where it should bend to the outside world. I think we’re actually working very well at bending the outside world to us.
Dang! Well, keep in mind, he did start his talk by saying he was just going to take a short moment to be a little “arrogant.”
Rails is by no means the only great, new, web framework out there. There is Django, there is CakePHP, there are both FuseBox and Mach-ii (for Coldfusion and possibly PHP as well). There is the Zend Framework, a rather newer one, I believe. But for better or worse, Rails has tipped into something a lot larger than most people, probably, expected. It may or may not be “fair,” but it is what it is. I, for one, welcome our new Ruby on Rails overlords. Onward.
I don’t have time to try this on right now but…
For a very excited review, see this blog post at Ruby Stole my o`o.
You’ve probably gotten used to referring to Internet addresses as URLs. A URL is a Uniform Resource Locator, like “http://www.example.com/something.html”. They encompass locations which are not web pages, as well: an ftp location such as “ftp://admin:secret@example.com:21/stuff” is also a URL.
So, what’s a URI?
URI has been creeping into The Literature for some time, and from context alone it would be pretty easy to assume that it is simply synonymous with “URL” — and for all intents and purposes, when talking about the web, that’s a safe assumption. It actually has an expanded meaning, however; URIs encompass both URLs and a convention called “URN”.
A URI is a “Uniform Resource Indentifier”. As such a URI may be either a URL (traditional Internet address/location) or a URN.
Okay, you may say: what the heck is a URN, and why should I care? The first question is easier: a URN is a “Unified Resource Name”. While a URL refers to where something is, a URN refers to what it is.
From The Literature (RFC 1737):
The purpose or function of a URN is to provide a globally unique, persistent identifier used for recognition, for access to characteristics of the resource or for access to the resource itself.
A URN may or may not have a corresponding URL; the RFC further notes that:
for URNs that have corresponding URLs, there must be some feasible mechanism to translate a URN to a URL.
What does a URN look like? I’m glad you asked. It looks like this (from RFC 2141):
“urn:” <NID> “:” <NSS>
where <NID> is the Namespace Identifier, and <NID> is the Namespace Specific String.
Wikipedia’s URN pages gives examples such as “urn:isbn:0451450523″, which would identify Peter S. Beagle’s The Last Unicorn by it’s book number.
The money question is one I asked above: why should we care? Is anyone using these, in the real world, and is there any reason you or I actually need to know this?
Who is using them, and how, are difficult questions to answer; the IETF seems to be using them, or at least, to have a group responsible for thinking about using them.
Why should you know about the above information? Well, I suppose one simple reason is simply to know the “actual” difference between a URI and a URL: a URI is a superset which contains all URLs and all URNs.
Other than that, I can only assume that as the Internet continues to develop, and the amount of information available through it continues to multiply, conventions such as the URN may become an increasingly important way of referring to various resources, especially if they can be automatically converted into corresponding URLs.
This is shameful… it would be shameful in any decade, but especially now that we are, (hopefully | supposedly), past this sort of prejudice; awful.
Please read:
In a nutshell; some black students chose to sit under a tree in a school courtyard that was, traditionally, a “white-only” spot to sit. The next day, three nooses were hanging from the tree. Understandably, tensions rose… a number of incidents occurred over the next while, culminating in a white student being injured and sent to the hospital in a school fight. Though the student left the hospital well in a few hours, the black students are being charged with attempted 2nd degree murder, and could face up to 100 years (!?) in prison. One of the six has already been sentenced to 22 years for aggravated assault.
At the risk of getting onto a soapbox and just plain being redundant… what year is this again? 1940? 1960? It would have been just as inexcusable in those eras, but given the progress which has supposedly been made since then… this ought to be unheard of.
</soapbox>
Bacn is “email you want, just not right now,” as opposed to spam, which everyone knows is email you don’t want at all. It is meant to describe the emails that are all the various notifications from, for example, social networking sites (You have a new Facebook messages, etc, etc) which you, supposedly, do want to know about, but which do wind up being just so much more detritus in the inbox.
I take it there’s considerable debate whether a term is needed for this, um, phenomenon. There’s also probably been so much debate in such a short amount of time that it will not surprise me if the term sticks, at least for some time. Any attempt to deliberately coin a different term at this point will probably just seem contrived, so we may just be stuck with bacn.
I’ve been stuck at w3.org for days now — nay, weeks, perhaps. You may know w3.org as the World Wide Web consortium, the group responsible for virtually all (if not absolutely all?) of the web standards which make the web work. If that weren’t enough, it was founded by Sir Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the World Wide Web.
As a sideline… have some people forgotten that “World Wide Web” was not just a quaint way the media began to refer to the Internet? Of course, the Web and “the Internet” are not even synonymous…. The World Wide Web is an application that runs on top of the Internet, specifically on the http protocol — but anyways, that is what it is. But you probably knew all that already; let’s go on.
I was recently wanting to dig a little deeper into CSS, DOM, and related technologies. What to do? Well, you could always spend a small fortune at Amazon, or you could spend a buck fifty on coffee at your local bookstore and spend the whole day reading Zeldman, Meyer, and the Rhino book. Then again, there’s always your local library, as long as you’re okay with books that were published five or six years ago.
Or, you could jet on over to w3.org and simply read the CSS2 standard recommendation.
Rusty on exactly what XHTML “strict” entails? Which DTD to use for your new web page, and why? You can read the XHTML recommendation, hot off the presses. Is that not enough for you? Just dive right into the XHTML Strict DTD itself. Even if you don’t “know” XML inside and out, an XML DTD is a surprisingly readable document.
Speaking of the XHTML DTD, if you do decide to browse through it (please don’t tell me I’m the only one hare-brained enough to do such things), you will see a cryptic looking “word” littering the document: i18n. It happens that this seems to be one of the few things I retained from reading XML in a Nutshell a few years back. “i18n” is an abbreviation for “internationalization,” for the simple reason that there are 18 letters between the “i” and the “n” in said word, and face it: “i18n” is a lot easier to type that “internationalization.”
So, all that preamble out of the way… there is a veritable virtual ton of other interesting recommendations and other documents over at w3.org.
- Ubiquitous Web Applications
- The Semantic Web
- The Web API Working Group, which concerns technologies such as the XMLHttpRequest Object, among other things.
- Web Application Formats Working Group
- There’s even a Widgets 1.0 working document.
Yeah, it just goes on and on. If you are even remotely any sort of web geek, this is a great resource. Of course, if you are any sort of web geek, you are most likely already familiar with what can generally be found at w3.org; but if you’re anything like me, you probably never bothered to read very much of it. IMHO, it’s well worth the (minimal) effort, and certainly cheaper than a spending spree at Amazon.
Here: http://jeremy.zawodny.com/blog/archives/009417.html
Thank you very much.
