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Cognition 0.1 Alpha 6

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Tonight I've released another alpha version of Cognition, my semantic web parser. Changelog includes: Microformats: Add option (disabled by default) to require <head profile> for microformat support. Microformat profiles are treated as opaque strings! Supports the following profiles: http://purl.org/uF/2008/03/ http://www.w3.org/2006/03/hcard or http://purl.org/uF/hCard/1.0/ http://dannyayers.com/microformats/hcalendar-profile or http://purl.org/uF/hCalendar/1.0/ http://purl.org/uF/hAtom/0.1/ http://purl.org/uF/rel-tag/1.0/ http://purl.org/uF/rel-license/1.0/ No profiles required for rel-enclosure, adr or … Continued

The Semantic Web

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One of my current interests is the semantic web — that is, the push to move from publishing text on the Web to publishing structured data, which can actually be understood by computers (in so far as a computer can truly “understand” anything). By publishing information so that computers can understand it, you make the … Continued

CSS to HTML Compiler

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I’ve searched around the ‘Net for something like this before, but without success, so decided to write my own. The basic idea is this: there are certain circumstances in which you need to write some styled HTML without access to the document’s header. For example, when composing HTML-formatted e-mails, which may be displayed in a … Continued

X-Blog-Name

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OK, so the Trackback specification includes the ability for a pinging page to specify its article title and blog name when it sends a trackback ping. However, these fields are optional. When not present, typically the recipient of the ping will then make an HTTP request back to the pinger to determine the article title … Continued

New BBC Home Page

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So the BBC has redesigned its home page. OK, so normally I’m against the “let’s be a portal” philosophy, but for the Beeb, I think it works. They produce such a colossal volume of content — and in areas that make sense for a portal site (news, weather, sports, listings info) — that they can … Continued

Open Mobile Alliance DTD Oops!

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The Open Mobile Alliance, who are responsible for co-ordinating the web-browsing efforts of mobile phones, seem to have misplaced xhtml-mobile12-model-1.mod. This file is a key part of the DTD for the latest version of their XHTML Mobile Profile standard, which defines how authors should construct web pages intended for the consumption of mobile phones. Now … Continued

Typography Links

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Most of the really pleasant web designs I see seem to display more than a little evidence of classical typographic knowledge. Here’s my collection of typography-related resources, including links to some classic (and some common) fonts. Tips and Tricks Mark Boulton: Five Simple Steps to Better Typography Richard Rutter & Mark Boulton: Web Typography Sucks … Continued

URLs in demiblog

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URL design is important. For this reason I’ve put a lot of thought into the URLs used by demiblog. demiblog has a PHP object SiteURLSpace that maps between URLs and data queries. This means that demiblog’s URLs don’t necessarily have to bear much resemblence to its code structure. It’s also pretty easy to completely replace … Continued

Keen on Web 2.0

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The Observer has an interesting article about Andrew Keen’s new book The Cult of the Amateur: How Today’s Internet is Killing Our Culture and Assaulting Our Economy. Although the book isn’t released until early June, according to the Observer article the basic premise is that: bloggers and other evangelists for the web [are] destroying culture, … Continued

Hurrah! A Blog for Toby!

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At last, my new CMS is at a stage when I’m able to actually start publishing with it. Now that I have an easy-ish tool to publish with, you can expect that this website will be updated more frequently and with more and better content. Updating this website in the past has been a major … Continued

Re: target new window = good or bad?

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idiotprogrammer wrote: I find this to be bothersome and contrary to current web trends. But I can find no articles or recommendations to back me up here. Windows User Experience team, Microsoft Windows User Experience Frequently Asked Questions: Why is the taskbar at the bottom of the screen?, March 2001 Research shows that most users … Continued

Re: Views on XHTML 1.1 site

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David Dorward wrote: Jukka K. Korpela wrote: But the W3C makes a big noise about it! See http://www.w3.org main page right now. They have created a working draft for XHTML 1.1 Second Edition. Which says that XHTML 1.1 SHOULD be served as text/html… and references a document which says it SHOULD NOT be served as … Continued

On The Legibility of PHP

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David Segall wrote: I do not deny that the programmer is the most significant factor in the readability of a program but would you really promote PHP as a language because it is easy to read? I certainly wouldn’t advise against it because of legibility concerns. Any language that supports comments (not all do) and … Continued

Reusable Form Functions

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Like me, you are probably confronted with many requests for surveys, questionnaires, feedback forms, registration forms and so forth: forms where the processing requirements are very simple (store in a database or e-mail to a particular address). Despite the simple requirements, there is often quite a lot of work involved: crafting a database to store … Continued

On Custom DTDs

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Dylan Parry wrote: Of course, but validating against a custom, non-standards controlled DTD is a complete waste of time for HTML. That would be validation for validation’s sake. If you can’t validate against a recognised doctype then there is truly no point in attempting to create your own to cover your problems Using a custom … Continued

Reusable Table Functions

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Ross wrote: I am seeking your advice on the programming language for such an action. i prefer a web table capable of sorting by size, length and so on, therefore built-in function for sorting is appreciated. Down below are a couple of nice PHP functions that may be of use. I’ve taken them from my … Continued