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Blog Entries from February 2008
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Adobe AIR Released
This week Adobe has released Adobe Integrated Runtime (external link), or AIR for short. AIR is an amazing advancement of web technology, bringing it to the desktop! Basically, it allows developers to use web technologies - HTML, JavaScript, Flash, etc. - to build applications for the desktop. AIR uses the Webkit rendering engine and allows developers to create applications that will work on both Mac OSX and Windows.
Personally, I have not had a chance to play around with AIR just yet, but I am extremely excited to see web technologies being used on the desktop in a cross-platform environment.
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Good Web Development Related Blogs
Here is a list of some of my favourite web development related blogs. Note that not all of these blogs pertain 100% to web development, but I find them valuable and informative in my development career.
- Signal vs. Noise (external link) - General design and usability
- Anne van Kesteren (external link) - Employee of Opera who has a sensible view about web standards
- SitePoint blogs (external link) - General web development
- Simon Willison (external link) - Web development, particularly JavaScript
- StopDesign (external link) - Design
Please feel free to post any others that you like to read.
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Proprietary Formats
This afternoon, I spent nearly three hours just applying for housing at the University of Minnesota, the school I will be attending next semester. It is ridiculous that it took me this long to fill out the online application. First, a major issue was that the website required Internet Explorer, so I had to snag the family laptop that has Windows; my Macs were not going to work.
I got the application filled out, but I had to print out a final form to send back to the university signed with a signature. Here is where the problem with proprietary formats started. There are two printers in my house: one hooked up to my iMac and one hooked up to the family PC running Ubuntu. My printer was out of ink, otherwise it would have worked fine with the laptop, because it is newer and it uses a standard USB connection. However, the family printer uses an old parallel connector, which would not connect to the laptop. Therefore, I just quickly saved the page into the Microsoft Document Imaging format (external link), which I thought I could print out rather easy on another computer. Wrong.
To my disappointment, the MDI format turned out to be a proprietary Microsoft format. I spent about an hour trying to convert the file into something that could be read on my Mac, but I had no success in finding a conversion program that actually worked. I ended up driving down to my mother's business to use her PC to print out the form. Utterly ridiculous.
Mac OS X can save anything as a PDF that is going to be printed. I thought that the MDI format would be similar to PDF; and it is, except that the format is entirely closed. As I sat there about ready to go into a mental breakdown, I wondered why Windows XP would not just let me save the printer output as a PDF or as some other open image format? Proprietary file formats simply suck. I am glad that frustration is over finally.
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RSS: <author> vs: <dc:creator>
RSS is an utter mess of standards and a spaghetti of versioning. Quite often I wonder why I myself do not switch to using Atom feeds. Even with the multiple versions of RSS, it still has managed to have remaining errors and issues which it needs to iron out. One of these kinks is the
<author>tag.At first glance, it would make perfect semantic sense for the
<author>tag to contain the name or the information of the author of a particular content piece. This is true to an extent; however, the<author>tag is geared more towards containing the email address of the author. Who would want their email address openly travelling around the Internet on an RSS feed? The issue that bothers me is the<author>tag has to contain the author's email address before it can contain the author's name. Sure, most RSS readers can handle an<author>tag holding only a name, but it will not validate.Rather, you are meant to use the
<dc:creator>tag if you wish to only have the name of the author. I am glad there is at least a solution for something that seems so basic, but I still cannot understand why the<author>tag cannot accept just names as well. Perhaps someone can explain to me some reasoning against this, but I highly doubt there is any logical reasoning.Therefore, if you are only using the name of the author in an RSS item make sure to use the
<dc:creator>tag and not the<author>tag:XML
<item>
<title>Net Neutrality: Preserving the Free Internet</title>
<description><![CDATA[The freedom of the Internet is under attack by the telecommunication companies of the world, but particularly in North America. Net neutrality is essential in order to maintain the frontier-aspect of the Internet, allowing everyone to play on a level playing field. Without net neutrality being mandated by law, the Internet as we know it will cease to exist.]]></description>
<link>http://www.lowter.com/article/net-neutrality</link>
<guid isPermaLink="true">http://www.lowter.com/article/net-neutrality</guid>
<pubDate>Sat, 29 Dec 2007 11:15:15 -0600</pubDate>
<dc:creator>Ethan Poole</dc:creator>
</item>Also make sure that you include the proper namespace for the Dublin Core in the
<rss>tag:XML
<rss version="2.0" xmlns:dc="http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/"> -
PunBB 1.3 Beta Released
Rickard Andersson just announced the release of the new PunBB 1.3 beta (external link). PunBB (external link) is a very light-weight, fast, standards-compliant, and simple bulletin board system. Its code is simple and its markup is proper XHTML. PunBB is a fantastic bulletin board system without the unnecessary bloat of other bulletin board systems.
PunBB 1.3 brings a lot of much-needed improvements to PunBB, primarily the introduction of the extension system, which allows developers to create organised modifications based on a hook system. I am excited to see how successful the extension system is. Also, I look forward to no longer having to manually make PunBB updates because of Lowter's modifications to the code.
There are a number of refinements and overall it is a spectacular piece of PHP code. You can download the beta from PunBB's website (external link).
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