Continuing on the TAG
I am delighted and deeply honored that Tim Berners-Lee has appointed me to serve for another two years as chair of the W3C Technical Architecture Group (TAG).  The TAG is the senior technical body responsible for the World Wide Web.
Also in the official announcement is word that Dan Appelquist of Vodafone will be joining us. This is great news, as Dan has made important contributions to the Web for years, and he brings lots of expertise with mobile devices and applications. Henry Thompson, Ashok Malhotra, and Jonathan Rees have also been re-elected or reappointed to the TAG.
Topics: Web, Internet, Computing | 2 Comments »
Lotus Notes 1.0 was released 20 years ago today
Ed Brill has a post noting the 20th anniverary of the announcement of Lotus Notes 1.0. Today is also the 25th anniversay of the founding of Iris Associates, the company set up by Ray Ozzie, Tim Halvorsen and Len Kawell to to create notes.
Topics: History of computing, Web, Internet, Computing | No Comments »
Greg Pfister on Intel’s announcement of a 48 core experimental chip
Greg Pfister has a terrific post on Intel’s announcement of a 48 core experimental “Single Chip Cloud Computer”. Apparently this thing has shared memory, but no cache coherence — building software for this won’t be easy. According to Greg, this will (unlike Larrabee) be manufactured in very small quantities for experimental use.
Topics: Web, Internet, Computing | No Comments »
Gig alert: appearing with Robert Cedrone on Saturday, Dec. 5th
Robert Cedrone and I will be appearing a week from today on December 5th at 7 PM at the Starbucks (map) that’s on the north side of Lexington, MA (not the one in the center of town!) Robert plays acoustic guitar and sings a mix of covers including Van Morrison, Al Green, Southside Johnny, Roy Orbison, etc., and some originals too.  This time, we’re expecting some guest pickers too. It’s only an hour, but if you feel like stopping by for some coffee and a little music, please do! Robert has for years been the lead singer and guitarist for legendary Boston-area band, the Urge, and these local gigs give him a chance to get and do something a bit quieter. There are also a couple of other groups on ahead of us, so come early.
The gig will be at:
Starbucks
60 Bedford St
Lexington, MA 02420
(781) 863-1189
Update:We had a great time at the gig. Many, many thanks to Ron Chancey and Rob Carlson for sitting in and adding the killer guitar fills. A little blurb about the evening has been posted by David Keevil, who does such a great job of organizing these music nights.
Topics: Boston area, Music, Non-technical | No Comments »
W3C TPAC Presentation on HTML Extensibility
This morning I gave an invited talk at the 2009 W3C Technical Plenary (TPAC) summarizing the ongoing controversy regarding HTML 5 Extensibility. The presentation files are available in .ppt, .odp, and .pdf formats in the W3C public archive. Discussion welcome here.
Topics: Web, Internet, Computing | 1 Comment »
A response to Neil McAllister on the Mobile Web
Last week, Neil McAllister of InfoWorld wrote an article titled The Sad State of the Mobile Web Gets Even Sadder. The community badly needs careful and balanced analysis of the mobile Web, of the various platform-specific SDKs (such as the iPhone and Android SDKs), and especially of which models are likely to be good for what. Unfortunately, McAllister’s analysis is flawed in a number of important ways. Read the rest of this entry »
Topics: Web, Internet, Computing | 2 Comments »
Nikon D300s won’t mount as a USB drive
(I’ve been intending for some time to start posting more photo-related items. I just happened to stumble on this surprising tidbit last week.)
I’ve come to depend on the fact that pretty much every digital camera I’ve ever used, from small point-n-shoots to high end DSLRs, has allowed me to see the camera’s memory card as an ordinary filesystem drive when connected through USB. This is handy for a variety of reasons. First of all, it lets me use a very wide range of software tools to directly access the images and other files on the memory card. Also, when visiting with friends, it’s an easy way to hook the camera up to their computers, to leave them copies of pictures (being careful of viruses, of course.) Unfortunately, this option seems to be disappearing, at least from some high end Nikons.
Topics: Photography | 5 Comments »
W3C Hosts Web Developer Gathering (Nov. 5, Bay Area)
Approximately once a year, the W3C hosts a combined gathering of the many working groups that develop Web standards such as HTML, XML, Web Services, etc.  Traditionally, the attendees have been members of the working groups, who have the opportunity to visit each others’ meetings, etc. This year, the W3C is adding a Thursday afternoon “Developer Gathering” on November 5th that is open to anyone who is interested, regardless of whether they are active in the W3C.  There is a meeting page with information about registration, etc. Many of the most influential designers and developers of core Web standards will be either at the Developer Gathering, or in nearby working group meetings and available for discussion during breaks. Read the rest of this entry »
Topics: Web, Internet, Computing | No Comments »
Happy Birthday, UNIXâ„¢
40 years ago, in August of 1969, Ken Thompson‘s wife headed west for a few weeks on a family trip, leaving Ken the month it would take to allocate “one week each to the four core components of operating system, shell, editor and assembler” that he and Dennis Ritchie decided to write after work on Multics was canceled. (see article on the BBC’s Web site.) Read the rest of this entry »
Topics: History of computing | No Comments »
Excellent tutorial on XML Schema (XSD) 1.1
A few weeks ago I noted that XML Schema 1.1 is now a W3C Candidate Recommendation.  Roger Costello has put together a terrific tutorial which starts with a quick overview of the new features and why they matter, and then goes into detail on how to use them. He’s also put together some exercises. Highly recommended!
Topics: Web, Internet, Computing | No Comments »
HTML 5
Awhile ago I posted a pointer to Sam Ruby’s efforts to unify XHTML and HTML 5. Indeed, lots of people have considered lots of ways of getting the best of both of these technologies, but the net result is that W3C has now decided to focus exclusively on HTML 5 as the specification for future versions of HTML. Work on XHTML is, mostly, being discontinued.
This decision by W3C is a very big deal. HTML is the key content standard for the Web, and the W3C has chosen a direction for its future. Although there has been lots of politics and controversy relating to HTML, and although there are aspects of the current HTML 5 draft that I’m not fond of, I think it’s good that W3C is focusing it’s effort on one technology and on one “brand”. Users are confused when there are two flavors of HTML to chose from.  Now there’s one clear path forward, and it’s HTML 5.  The W3C has published a very interesting FAQ about these new plans and their implications. If you build Web applications or if you are interested in the future of Web technology, the FAQ is well worth reading.
Although some of the work currently being done under the auspices of the XHTML working group will continue in other W3C groups, the XHTML working group itself is wrapping up, and work on specifications like XHTML 2.0 and XHTML modularization will cease. HTML 5 will still be usable with XML tooling, at least to some degree. Specifically, the HTML 5 specification will provide an optional XML-compatible format for “serializing” HTML. This will be in addition to the more conventional serializations of HTML, in which tags (e.g. <p>) aren’t necessarily matched by closing tags (</p>), etc.
There are many interesting and very important questions that remain unresolved, such as whether and how to provide for distributed extensibility in HTML.  The FAQ gives an overview of some of them.
Topics: Web, Internet, Computing | 5 Comments »
Gig alert: appearing with Robert Cedrone on Saturday, June 6
My good friend Robert Cedrone appears occasionally doing solo gigs north of Boston, and I often accompany him on bass.  This Saturday, June 6, we’ll be appearing for an hour starting at 7 PM at the Starbucks (map) that’s on the north side of Lexington, MA (not the one in the center of town!) Robert plays acoustic guitar and sings a mix of covers including Van Morrison, Al Green, Southside Johnny, Roy Orbison, etc., and some originals too. The gig will be very small, very informal (this is a Starbucks, not House of Blues), and quite short, but if you feel like stopping by for some coffee and a little music, please do! Robert has for years been the lead singer and guitarist for legendary Boston-area band, the Urge, and these local gigs give him a chance to get and do something a bit quieter. There are also a couple of other groups on ahead of us, so come early.
Topics: Music, Non-technical | No Comments »
Blog Performance Problems
The hosting service for this blog, Dreamhost, has mostly provided excellent support and good performance. Well, they continue to provide good support, which is to say that every time I’ve complained they’ve gotten back to me with very good and very sympathetic explanations, but the fact is they’re having some serious performance problems lately. They assure me that they’re working hard to get things fixed, but in the meantime, that’s the reason that this blog is sometimes embarrassingly slow to respond. I’m sorry for any inconvenience. Feel free to report any unusual problems as comments.
Update: as of May 25 May 29, performance has been excellent for the past 5 10 days or so. Thanks to everyone at Dreamhost for getting things straightened out!
Thank you.
Topics: Arcane domain blog | 1 Comment »
XML Schema 1.1 is now a W3C Candidate Recommendation
Many readers of this blog know that I was one of the original designers and editors of the W3C XML Schema Language Recommendation (XSD). Since publication of version 1.0 in May 2001, a small group of us has continued to work on incremental improvements. I am therefore delighted to announce that, a few days ago, XML Schema Version 1.1 became a W3C Candidate Recommendation. This means that the specification is feature-complete, and the W3C is waiting for two or more interoperable implementations to demonstrate that the technology is suitable for designation as a full W3C Recommendation.
Topics: Web, Internet, Computing | 1 Comment »
Comment Copyrights Redux
Early readers of this blog will remember that the original policy on comment copyrights caused some controversy. You can read about that in the posting Copyrights and Comments and especially in the interesting comment thread that followed. As promised, I took some time to think about it all, and to talk to some people whose opinions I respect.
The net is that I have decided to take Sam Ruby’s advice, which was to adapt the copyright license used by the Apache Software Foundation.  Specifically, for comments posted starting today, you retain ownership of your copyright. In return for having your comment posted, you grant to me:
“…a perpetual, worldwide, non-exclusive, no-charge, royalty-free, irrevocable copyright license to reproduce, prepare derivative works of, publicly display, publicly perform, sublicense, and distribute your comment contribution and derivative works thereof.”
As noted in the agreement, I thus reserve the right to republish such material in any form, but I promise to make reasonable efforts to retain the attribution to you.
I apologize again for the concerns that the original policy raised, and I hope that this policy is an improvement. Thanks to Sam, Ben Adida, all the commentators on the original thread, and everyone who helped me to understand the concerns and the options. To everyone who reads the Arcane Domain blog, your comments are always very much appreciated!
Noah
Topics: Arcane domain blog, Non-technical | 1 Comment »