March 12, 2004, 9:02 PM ET
RSS at Poynter E-Media Tidbits
After the Hypergene MediaBlog folks pointed out they didn't read Poynter's E-Media Tidbits weblog because it didn't have an RSS feed, and Tidbits' Steve Outing responded with the reason, I offered to help the Poynter folks create a feed. I'm pleased to say that E-Media Tidbits now has RSS. Look for more Poynter.org feeds in the near future.
March 10, 2004, 12:20 AM ET
Web site shows your page's metadata
Like many Web-development bloggers, I've written about the importance of writing valid and semantically-rich HTML -- code that's heavy on self-description.
It's generally frustrating to evangelize semantic markup, though, because its advantages aren't immediately apparent. Why should people take time to put <q> tags around quotes if Web browsers don't really do anything useful with them? The main point of semantic markup is to make documents easily understood by computers -- but computers don't seem to be doing anything exciting with the markup yet, on a large scale.
Well, now there's this thing, the W3C's Semantic data extractor. Pop in a URL, and it'll attempt to glean as much semantic information from the page as it can. It's a great way of visualizing what sort of data a computer can extract from a Web page.
What an outstanding idea. Developers should know about this.
March 9, 2004, 3:00 PM ET
IE hack could benefit from centralization
Dean Edwards' IE7 is a hot topic on Web-development sites lately. A brilliant hack, it lets Web authors paste a single line of code into their HTML pages in order to "enable" certain advanced CSS and JavaScript functionality in Internet Explorer -- the browser that's fallen far behind Mozilla and Opera in compliance with new markup and scripting standards.
The single drawback of IE7 is its size. Taking advantage of it requires users to download a 10 KB file. So here's an idea: Why couldn't a trusted central authority -- mozilla.org or webstandards.org, for instance -- host the One True Version of this file, and ask Web developers to link to it? That way, users' computers would cache the file the first time it was downloaded.
