intertwingly

It’s just data

XHML 2 Charter Set To Expire

Philippe Le Hegaret and Ian Jacobs: W3C management has decided to allow the Working Group’s charter to expire at the end of 2009 and not to renew it ... we expect the next generation XML serialization of HTML to be defined in the HTML 5 specification.

Media Dependent Styling

I finally decided to upgrade my cell phone to one that supports the web and email.  I settled on an LG enV3 in slate blue.  One of the pages I frequently check is my comments page, and as I had taken care to ensure that the markup degraded gracefully, the page displays adequately on my mobile device — with one obvious annoyance that surprised me.

To read the comments, I have to horizontally scroll.

Rails Book Update and Outlook

Agile Web Development with Rails, 3rd Edition is about to have its third printing.  Translations are under way for Chinese, Japanese, Korean, and Spanish.  One thing I wasn’t aware of before participating in the development of this book is that printers have an opportunity to address errata in each printing.  Other changes are fodder for a new edition (or possibly even a new title).  What would I like to see in a follow-on to this book?

ECMAScript 5 Test Suites

Christian Plesner Hansen: Today we’re releasing the Sputnik JavaScript test suite. Sputnik is a comprehensive set of more than 5000 tests that touch all aspects of the JavaScript language as defined in the ECMA-262 standard.

Allen Wirfs-Brock: Anyone who has the interest and skills for developing individual ECMAScript conformance tests are invited to participate in the project. If you’re interested check out the Codeplex site and get involved.

Test Notifications

Yehuda Katz: Last week, Carl and I started digging into the Rails initializer, and the tests in the initializer (railties) are more mock-based and less reliable than the tests in ActionPack (which we’ve been working with so far). They’re pretty reasonable unit tests for individual components, but getting all of the tests to pass did not result in an (even close) bootable Rails app.

To help with spreading the word, I’ve created a registration page where those with an interest in doing so can sign up for IM notification on test results.

Validator.Nu on GCJ Update

ruby test/fonts.rb test/google.html
size => -1
size => -1
size => -2
size => -2

I jotted down a few notes.

Revisiting RedHat

I switched to Debian in 2003 given the uncertainty at the time for RedHat.  Eighteen months later, I switched to Ubuntu as I found the unpredictable release cycle of Debian to be an issue.

I had occasion to try Fedora again yesterday when debugging a GCP/JAXP issue.  I was curious to see what had changed since I had last looked into a RPM based distribution over five years ago, and the answer in retrospect was totally obvious.  The difference between two 2009 vintage Linux distributions is much smaller than the difference between a 2009 vintage distribution and a 2003 vintage distribution, even of those distributions came from the same place.

Calling JAXP from Ruby

I’ve now got a Ruby module that calls into the JAXP API.  Why is this a big deal?  Validator.nu has a HtmlDocumentBuilder that complies with HTML 5.  Furthermore, JAXP has full support for XPath and Nokogiri has the ability to convert CSS into XPath.  This may seem like going the long way around, but my intuition is that the expensive parts will be transferring data across the language boundary (especially strings).  Having a DOM entirely on the Java side, probed via CSS selectors and/or XPath expressions and only retrieving the specific nodes across the Java/Ruby boundary for further processing should minimize this issue.  And the end result should be able to pass all of the Nokogiri and Validator.nu tests.

Invoking HtmlParser from C++

On Friday, I said Next task is to repackage the htmlparser as a library, and to reimplement the HTML2XML tool itself in C++.  This is now done.  In the process, I also converted a SystemErrErrorHandler class into C++ so that I could be sure that I was able to do both Java=>C++ and C++=>Java calls.

Rest In Place

Edit in place is a handy feature where clicking on an area of a web page replaces that portion of the page with a form which will enable the user to update that information.  At one time, this was a part of Rails, but in 2007 it moved out to a plugin, and improved upon.  The one that looked like it most closely matched my needs was REST in Place.  It comes in three flavors, I picked JQuery.