I was doing some experiments with Adam in the lab on Friday, and we discovered some interesting variations in the way that Firefox and Safari implement the HTML 5 Cache Manifest specification. I think this is a particularly important feature to have implemented consistently across platforms because it is the make-or-break feature of HTML5 that [...]
Today, we rely increasingly on the Web for a multitude of everyday activities that run the gamut from simple queries to complex social interactions. As a result, our browsing patterns are starting to reflect the intricate and multi-faceted nature of our daily lives, but web browsers retain little of the nuanced richness of this information [...]
One of the most exciting aspects of the (in-progress) HTML5 specification is the number of data-centric features it contains. It’s almost as if the committee is saying a big, “OK, OK! We heard you!” to all the data-heads out there and is providing not one, not two, not three, but four different ways to [...]
A month ago Stefano Mazzocchi published an interesting article on data reconciliation (detecting when two identifiers refer to the same item, and merging them) where he advocated a more centralized “a priori” approach (trying to keep the identifiers merged at the beginning). I posted a response arguing the value of a more anarchic “a posteriori” [...]
We’ve launched a service for letting people share, in real time, what pages they’re looking at on the web. Our system, eyebrowse, lets the person choose exactly what sites they want to share their viewing patterns about, and eyebrowse does the rest — producing statistical visualisations of your web browsing habits over time, compared to [...]
Stefano Mazzochi used to work at our SIMILE project here at MIT, where we explored the use of RDF and Semantic Web tools for the sharing of knowledge. He has since gone to work at Metaweb and, it seems, become much more friendly to their “top down” approach of trying to create a centralized repository [...]
Microformats and RDFa provide a way to interweave semantic markup within a web document so that structured information can be more easily extracted. Both Microformats and RDFa follow the hierarchical model of HTML: structured data to be extracted may exist spread across several layers of the DOM
hierarchy. A pseudocode example of this is below, where we see that [...]
Tim Berners-Lee’s recent TED talk on Linked Data has inspired quite a few people to ask what exactly linked data is, how it differs from data on the semantic web, and how realistic it is to assume universal and unique addressability of data items. A world with linked data would be a world with richer, [...]
A lot of things, Mike Stonebraker might say, but I have something rather fundamental in mind.
Suppose I’m developing some sort of academic course management system. Chances are I’ll want to display to the user a list of course offerings and their associated course codes, readings from the syllabus, meeting times etc. Maybe something like this:
Now [...]
This is a nice talk by Kian Win Ong of UCSD called “Do It Yourself custom forms-driven workflow applications.” They’re looking at all the work people invest building special purpose content management systems that really offer users little more than “CRUD” (create, read, update delete) interactins for certain specialized kinds of content.
The basic approach is [...]