dretblog

HTML in Atom

one of the joys of Atom is that processing text in Atom is not quite as easy as it seems. the reason is that Atom supports three types of content for text constructs, text, html, and xhtml. this means that... Read more →

FOAF me!

after visiting the WWW2008 conference in beijing last week, i am once again curious to find out more about all the stuff that is going on on the web, both in terms of technologies and in terms of pragmatic and... Read more →

Blogging from China

i just arrived in beijing for WWW2008 and LocWeb 2008. working with the hotel's internet connection turns out to be interesting. of course, you are never sure whether the internet connection is just spotty or there is something else going... Read more →

GIR'08 Call for Papers

Workshop on Geographical Information Retrieval GIR'08 Call for Papers http://www.geo.unizh.ch/~rsp/gir08/ This is a first call for papers for a Workshop on Geographic Information Retrieval (GIR’08), to be held in conjunction with the 17th ACM Conference on Information and Knowledge Management,... Read more →

Identity on the Semantic Web

recently i wrote about HTTP Philosophy and how the Semantic Web now runs into some very fundamental problems: if the Web part of its name should be more than just clever branding (which it certainly is), then it has to... Read more →

File System Access in XSLT

XSLT 2.0 introduces the unparsed-text() function, which allows XSLT programs to read text documents. this is very useful, because it allows access to non-XML information from within XSLT. and in conjunction with XSLT 2.0's largely improved capabilities for text processing,... Read more →

Text in Atom

working with Atom should be easy, because it is a pretty simple data model. in practice, it is easy, but maybe not quite as easy as you might expect at first sight. there are two reasons for these complications: HTML:... Read more →

Google Reader Delay

Google Reader probably is one of the most popular web-based feed readers. of course, they don't actually read all the feeds when a user requests them, they use some kind of cache. after Google acquired FeedBurner, the back-ends of FeedBurner... Read more →

iPhone Spell Checking

typing on the iPhone's virtual keyboard kind of works, but it is error-prone and not very fast. and since most applications still do not support rotation (which would be a good way to present a less cramped keyboard layout, as... Read more →

Internationalized Quotes

one of the things HTML is good at is that it supports at least some semantics, for example for using quoted text by using the element, if you are using a decent browser (specifically, not IE). you can even... Read more →