the ryan king

Today was day 1 for me at Technorati and unlike most first days on a job, I actually got a good deal of work done.

When I first announced that I’d be working at Technorati for the summer, several people said something to the effect of ‘I hope you get to do something cool with microformats.’ Well, I have. :-)

In an effort to facilitate the adoption of hCalendar, I’ve created a javascript based tool for creating hCalendar entries. Please let me know if you have any problems with it or have any other suggestions for improvement.

Don’t expect me to check in for every day I’m at Technorati- maybe just when something cool happens.

Sorry if some things look crusty around here for a bit, I’m trying to do a bit of blog remodeling. Let me know if something looks really out of place.

In addition to switch to using MarsEdit (or maybe Ecto), I’m going to mess with the layout, get rid of the categories and maybe change some permalink structure.

The other day, I asked:

What if we think about the Web this way:

• XTHML = Model
• CSS = View
• {Java/EMCA/DOM}scripting = controller

Tantek responded with:

I think this makes a lot of sense. In fact, see:

http://tantek.com/log/2004/09.html#d12t2359

for some thoughts on the matter. Interesting that we both drew the same analogy.

I do think you made an additional good point about now with AJAX, XCJ/MVC considerations are perhaps more important than ever.

I’ve thought about this more over the last few days and I have a few thoughts

1. I think this is really important given the whole AJAX craze. Developers and designers need to be extra careful to be sure that they find a balance between dynamic interfaces and open, query-able HTML-as-api interfaces. These two movements are worthwhile, but could easily interfere with each other (well, really I’m just talking about AJAX interfering with having consumable HTML).
2. I’ve been trying to think of how we could apply what we know about MVC to XCJ, but its tough because of a key difference. In my understanding of MVC, the Controller is somewhat of a primary component, coordinating the active of the other two. In XCJ, the XHTML is the primary component, which coordinates the other two pieces by linking to or including them inline. I’m not sure what the implications of this are.
3. In the FOO Camp Wiki page which Tantek links to in the above-referenced post, there’s a comment which says:
   

   where do you go beyond MVC?

   data structure patterns in XHTML

   If we’re going to think of XHTML as ‘just-data,’ it would be useful to think of its structures like datastructures. It seems that we have some XHTML data structures already. Some simple analogies:

   • Definition Lists = Hashes
   • Unordered Lists = bags?
   • Ordered Lists = Arrays

   And for multi-dimensional data we could either nest these simple structures or use tables.

4. Thinking about XHTML as just data could really change the way people develop websites.

XCJ is the logical conclusion of the semantic html, microformats, html-as-api ideas. Each of these are attempts to make the Web more data- and meaning-rich while building on current tools.

Once presentation has been banished to CSS-siberia and behavior to Javascript-jail, all that’s left is data, right?

Conan O’Brien has seen the future of television and comes back to say:

TiVo, the digital recorder with a brain, will continue to evolve with alarming speed. Super-TiVos will arrange marriages between like-minded viewers and will persuade mismatched couples to throw in the towel and start seeing other people. Tough-talking TiVos will even confront viewers, saying, “You’ve watched 40 straight hours of ‘Sponge- Bob’—get off the weed!” One of TiVo’s best loved features—its ability to provide viewers with commercial-free television—will inevitably force TV advertising to go extinct. As a result, celebrities will be forced to find new and creative ways to compromise their integrity. (At this moment, the writer pauses to slake his thirst with a delicious Diet Peach Snapple… now with less aspartame!) The sudden loss of ads on television will push many companies to stage their pitches live on Broadway, revitalizing the theater in America and garnering Patti LuPone a Tony award for her work with Geico.

Hilarious and worth a read.

Via Doc Searls.

So I had a random thought the other day….

What if we think about the Web this way:

• XTHML = Model
• CSS = View
• {Java/EMCA/DOM}scripting = controller

Of course, design purists (and even not-so-purists) will argue with this analogy and I admit that its not a perfect analogy, but the XHTML=Model part might be a useful way to think of things. Let me explain….

The other day, several of us were discussing the ironicly incompatible trends that are occuring on the web recently- AJAX and HTML-as-API/Microformats. Both these technologies are very cool, but, unfortunately, AJAX-style web development tends to make consuming Microformats more difficult (though not impossible).

As a compromise between these two movements, thinking of the XHTML as a Model could be useful. Think of the XHTML as just data which can then be viewed and dispalyed with CSS + DOMscripting or consumed by agents that are looking for structured data.

Just an idea that’d I’d like to cast into the blogosphere for discussion. Whatcha think?