MetaFilter posts tagged with xml

Sic Transit Gloria VML

XMLicious — Thu, 07 Jan 2010 20:41:47 -0800

Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) - a sort of image format which records shapes and lines instead of pixels - is partially supported in most web browsers but not in Internet Explorer. Javascript libraries such as dojo.gfx and Raphaël have tried to bridge the gap programmatically with impressive results but it remains difficult to simply draw something in one of the available illustration tools and display it on the web (without converting to a raster graphic as Wikipedia does.) But hope for compatibility may be on the horizon: Microsoft has just joined the W3C SVG Working Group. (pre vio us ly)

Erik Naggum (1965-2009)

e.e. coli — Sun, 21 Jun 2009 15:00:14 -0800

If anyone could flame from beyond the grave, it is he. Erik Naggum was a young programmer and Usenet philosopher who exemplified the new breed of smug Lisp weenie. His hatred for Perl, C++ and XML fueled his Olympian rants. He was cruel, but smart; he was articulate, but he used arguments ad hominem; he left a trail of scorched earth, but he had devoted friends. I didn't know him, but I enjoyed his expression of free thought. He died young after years of torment; R.I.P. Thanks, Google Groups.

The State of the Web 2008

netbros — Mon, 12 Jan 2009 04:25:52 -0800

The State of the Web 2008 is a report from Web Directions that includes details and analysis of all the responses to over 50 questions covering technologies, techniques, philosophies and practices that today’s web professionals employ. The survey was open for just under 3 weeks, from December 1st to 20th 2008. In total, over 1200 designers and developers from around the world responded to the survey. Respondents were likely to be self-educating, “early adopters” who keep abreast of developments in their field. Here are the tabular results. In short, what did the survey find? Some quite surprising results include:

just how few of the respondents use any form of Internet Explorer for their day to day web use (with only 3 out of over 1200 respondents using IE8), and similarly how few use Google Chrome as their primary browser, despite the splash the launch of that browser recently
nearly half of respondents use Mac OS X as their primary operating system, and only 10% use Windows Vista
less than a third of respondents test their web sites with Internet Explorer 8 (while Mobile Safari comes in at 20%, and Chrome at 40%)

There’s also a great deal of interest in terms of the nitty-gritty of web design philosophy and practice, from the high percentage of respondents who use JavaScript (around 95%), to the very small uptake of Silverlight (around 2% of all respondents) to the very high percentage of database driven sites (96%), overwhelmingly run on open source databases (over 80%). The number of responses, 1234 total, and the results themselves definitely provide both food for thought, and in many cases, cause for optimism that web development best practices are becoming more widely adopted over time. Web Directions conducts two major conferences annually in Sydney, Australia and Vancouver, Canada, and covers the full range of interests for web professionals - web design, front-end and and back-end development, information architecture, interaction design, accessibility, data visualization and much more. Their more focused conferences home in on specific areas and segments, as seen from their podcasts, slides, and other presentation materials.

Look out kids, you're gonna get hits

Knappster — Wed, 01 Oct 2008 14:25:33 -0800

The Text Encoding Initiative Consortium has encoded Dylan's Subterranean Homesick Blues. via

Resources for Web Developers

jonson — Sat, 07 Jul 2007 10:22:36 -0800

The Learn List is attempting to become a comprehensive online resource for free tutorials in Flash, PhotoShop, Fireworks, Illustrator, Dreamweaver, ActionScript, PHP, CSS & XML.

Web programming references

Roger Dodger — Thu, 21 Sep 2006 06:59:30 -0800

Web programmers take note, gotAPI is an excellent collection of searchable programming references wrapped up into a customizable interface.

Pentagon sets its sights on social networking websites

bukharin — Fri, 09 Jun 2006 01:04:28 -0800

Pentagon sets its sights on social networking websites From the fine folks that brought you the ~~Total~~ Terrorism Information Awareness program, another wickedly-named branch of the NSA, the Disruptive Technologies Office (formerly ARDA), is funding research into the usefulness of the Semantic Web for combing through and profiling the 80 million members of MySpace.

Amazon S3: Unlimited Simple Storage

ph00dz — Wed, 15 Mar 2006 05:48:28 -0800

Amazon launched S3: Unlimited Simple Storage. Take advantage of Amazon's global infrastructure to serve content, store data, and serve bittorrents.

Geeks wear tinfoil hats too!

sfts2 — Thu, 12 Jan 2006 19:10:50 -0800

National Information Exchange Model (NIEM) Sometimes, its the unheralded steps, that take you most quickly to your destination. On October 7, 2005, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS), the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ), and their associated domains announced the first release of the National Information Exchange Model (NIEM) Version 0.1. NIEM "establishes a single standard XML foundation for exchanging information between DHS, DOJ, and supporting domains, such as Justice, Emergency Management, and Intelligence." The release of this specification, and the development of the systems that utilize it may actually be the cataylst for more 'progress' in information mining on the individual than most other, well publicized efforts. NIEM Mission: "To assist in developing a unified strategy, partnerships, and technical implementations for national information sharing — laying the foundation for local, state, tribal, and federal interoperability by joining together communities of interest." When you say it like that, it sounds sort of cool!

The robot comes calling...

ph00dz — Tue, 13 Sep 2005 09:06:21 -0800

The robot comes calling... When web services attack! NotifyPhoneBasic will call any phone number in the US/Canada and read your message to that phone number. You can even set the caller id information.

Ajax - Asynchronous Javascript + XML

brownpau — Mon, 21 Feb 2005 08:59:22 -0800

Ajax: A New Approach to Web Applications. From our own JJG, a look at the next big thing in web app interfaces. Link via some guy named Matt. Time to start studying XMLHttpRequest.

Buy milk on the way home

riffola — Thu, 20 Jan 2005 20:49:57 -0800

Ta-Da List is 37 Signals' latest offering is free sharable to-do lists. You can keep them to yourself, share them with only specific people, or share them with the world. So now you have no excuse for forgetting to buy milk on the way home.

Free weather data via XML

mcwetboy — Sat, 04 Dec 2004 09:25:11 -0800

The weather just got a lot more accessible. The National Weather Service's weather data is now freely available in XML format for SOAP clients; it had previously been only available through commercial providers or in a difficult-to-decipher format. Not knowing anything about web services, I'm not sure about the implications, but I imagine that anyone who knows their SOAP could build their own weather app really easily.

riffola — Wed, 30 Oct 2002 10:10:08 -0800

Dave Winer's not happy about the fact that people are tweaking the orange XML icon used to link RSS/RDF feeds. You've seen that orange button saying XML at various sites, including MeFi. Milo just put up one saying RSS instead of XML, which was based on a point brought up by xiffix, "In hindsight, appropriating the global acronym XML for this narrow use was a mistake. The button should say RSS. Hopefully, people will take Dave’s suggestion to do something completely different to heart and abandon the Userland attempt at a standard icon"

semmi — Sun, 15 Sep 2002 22:18:29 -0800

An Editorial from Jane's, 9/11: in search of context and meaning "Fiction, non-fiction, news, news analysis and opinion... And unfortunately we continually mix and merge these groupings, using them in similar ways and often believing them to contain similar weight and importance." "We now tend to respond to the news rather than attempting to get behind it and create policy."

tilt — Fri, 19 Oct 2001 12:45:54 -0800

Jobs Skills Tester??? Not sure about how the employment stuff works but you can test your skills at various stuff... i had fun for 10 minutes checking out how my unix skills were (only 78% on the quick test) oh well... you have to register but there's no email password crap to take the tests. Over 100 different tests from ASP to XML.

rschram — Thu, 17 May 2001 13:09:57 -0800

It's Official
The semantic web as acceded from buzz and speculation to a new "Star Wars." There've been many thoughts on future applications of interoperable data formats including hypercitizenship.

bkdelong — Mon, 04 Dec 2000 09:26:05 -0800

The Apache Software Foundation XML Project releases a new SVG toy.

Bane — Wed, 27 Sep 2000 21:18:56 -0800

Here's a project for anyone who knows xml and has a bit of time to spare...

baylink — Mon, 31 Jul 2000 18:54:20 -0800

Courtesy of CamWorld, Here is what XML is really all about.

endquote — Tue, 11 Jul 2000 12:44:23 -0800

At work, I'm working on applying XSL transforms to XML documents to get HTML, HDML, and WML pages via an ISAPI filter for IIS. Maybe eventually I'll play with DISCO, and then I'll move on to SOAP, ROPE, and maybe even SAX. When will the acronymical madness stop?