Enhancing Structural Markup with JavaScript

Structural markup = Google power

Structural Patterns in XML

Structural patterns in XML (xml.com)

Professional JavaScript for Web
Developers: JavaScript in the Browser,
Pt. 1

Other News: Windows Structural Problems

Structural Analysis for Java 1.0.0
(Default branch)

Dr. Frame3D: 3-D CAD Program Determines
Structural Strength

MOM FAQ: Enhancing the MOM Console

Enhancing Your Image with Snap.com

Enhancing your Screen Effects

This week we will look at some unique screen-savers and screen-saver tools.

Option-Shift K Apple Hacker Swag!

On Reinventing Radio: Enhancing
One-to-Many with Many-to-Many...

So our first presentation is over - much to my relief. I think it went fairly well - Webb was busy addressing people's questions on IRC, and Biddulph, Hammond and I performed our little hearts out. There were some interesting questions afterwards which we all fielded and nothing went wrong. So probably all good stuff. Anyway - the paper is available for download as a PDF here: Reinventing Radio: Enhancing One-to-Many with Many-to-Many. I hear there's probably going to be an incredibly embarrassing video or audio version circulating around the web in the next couple of days or so. Wow am I looking forward to seeing that!

Just to whet your appetites, here are a couple of screencaps from the presentation to give you a sense of the areas we talked around:

Only one more to go now - BB C Programme Information Pages. I'll see you guys tomorrow for that!

Read the comments

Enhancing Apache with mod_security

"Droo" Tokuda: Enhancing A Magazine Via
DVD

The Amazing Breast Enhancing Ring Tone

A Japanese con artist science man named Hideto Tomabechi has claimed to have developed the world's first phone ring tone that increases the size of women's breasts.

"Most would think it's a lie, but the techniques involved in the process have been known for some time and are the result of research I carried out in the '80s and '90s," Tomabechi tells Shukan Gendai. "I use sounds that make the brain and body move unconsciously. It's a technique involving subliminal effects."

The ring tone, or 'chakumero,' can be downloaded as part of a package that costs ¥300 a month.

Chest challenged chicks ring in bigger breasts [MainichiDailyNews via TheInquirer]

Enhancing form usability with
instructions and validation

Microsoft enhancing business
intelligence in SQL Server

Intel to throttle power by enhancing
silicon

Fans create play-enhancing 'Doom' mods

BCC Software Introduces ZIP FOURce
Data-Enhancing Application

Intel CEO: technology, education
investment vital to enhancing GCC
prosperity

Vanishing Jobs: Structural change in the
economy means many jobs are never going
to come back. 12/19

money.cnn.com/2003/12/17/pf/q_nomorework/index.htm?cnn=yes
track this site | 4 links

Everdream Announces New Features
Enhancing Asset Tracking And Analytics
Capabilities

HDI, CompTIA and Microsoft Collaborate
To Promote Complementary Certifications
Focused on Enhancing IT Service and
Support Skills

Simple markup

Timothy Appnel: I have a new appreciation for the elegeance and simplicity of XML markup. Not that I didn't have one before its just grown the size of the Empire state building and illuminated in neon.

Obviously, I'm currently embarking on a similar mission, and share Tim's appreciation for XML.  My goals, however, are much lower than Tim's: I'm not trying to create a full markup language.  I'm applying 80/20 whenever I can: e.g., unordered lists are enough.  The times when full functionality is required, I'll  personally use full XHTML.

I'm currently looking into textile for inspiration.

Markup in titles in RSS?

The RSS 2.0 spec and its predecessors may not say clearly enough if you can or can't include markup in titles. But I don't think you should include markup in titles. Titles are like file names (not exactly of course). They are a happy medium between software and people. Both must be able to read them and make sense of them, in all contexts, and do so easily. While it seems reasonable that a description may contain markup, it also seems reasonable that a title should not. So, if I were writing a validator for RSS, and encountered markup in a title, I'd warn the author that many processors would not be happy about this and it would be safer to strip the markup from the title.

Disclaimer: Scripting News is a weblog, not a spec. If you interpret it as a spec you will be making a mistake. I think I've said this quite a few times, but a few people still treat it as if I were writing a spec here. Not so. And not fair.

A postscript. I went back to see what the spec actually says, and it turns out it's not really a problem with the spec, rather with my recollection of what the spec says. Scroll to elem ents of item. It says descriptions may contain entity-encoded HTML. It doesn't say that a title may. So if that's the biggest problem people can find with the spec (which many were flaming about when I wrote it, it's not like they offered any help, btw) then it's a pretty damned good spec if you ask me.

Q: Markup format?

Q: Which markup format do you use when posting?

Both Textile and Markdown are installed and I flip between them. When I want to post a lot of code without hassle I'll use Markdown because it seems smarter about that kind of thing. Most of the time, however, I want to just write so I'll use Textile; I find that it's a quick and mildly-intuitive way to access the various classes in my stylesheet for the myriad of things I do within this little block of space. Each has a purpose, so each gets used. I rarely enter raw HTML, and when I do it's typically to get around something broken in either markup format.

Et toi?

This entry was in Textile, for those keeping score. It is much easier to enter p(ps). or p(note). rather than <p class="ps"> or <p class="note">.

Markup-TreeNode-1.1.0

Markup-Tree-1.1.0

FML: Fiction Markup Language

When is someone going to come up with Fiction Markup Language — an XML spec solely for annotating fiction? For example:

Take perhaps the greatest novel ever written: Ian Fleming's 1953 classic "Casino Royale." Let's break this down from a big chunk of text to make up something more usable.

Obviously, you could mark the chapters and section numbers, but let's go further into the actual content of the narrative. Begin by surrounding all spoken text with tags. For example:

Perhaps you can have another attribute for "target" to identify to whom he's speaking. Then I could do an XPath query to find everything James Bond said to Vesper Lynd in the entire book.

And how about locations? Surround passages with their physical location, like the casino floor, Bond's hotel room, etc. (where appropriate — wouldn't work in all situations). I could then use XPath to find all the unique locations in the book (this would be great for the globe-hopping James Bond novels).

Identify "action" passages and mark them. How about the death of a character? Mark them so I can immediately find out where Le Chiffre was killed and read how it happened.

Introductions of characters are another thing. Mark the first appearance of each character so if I can't remember who someone is, I can go back and find where they first appeared and who they are.

I'm reading Tom Clancy's "Politika" right now, and I can hardly keep track of everyone. It'd be handy to be able to print a "report" showing who everyone is. (A good ebook client implementation of this would know what page the reader was on and not report anything past that page as to not spoil anything.)

Maybe mark the beginning and ending of pages as they appeared in the original publication. And have some way for an expert to insert commentary about the text.

James Bond novels are one thing, but imagine if someone did this for, say, "War and Peace". It would be like Cliffs Notes embedded in the text of the book.

There's unexplored potential here. I can't be the first person to think of this. (And another question: is this just an attempt to completely suck the soul right out of fiction? Should we just leave it the hell alone?)

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Keep 'em separated: Layout and markup.

A myriad of markup systems

It's hard to avoid the legions of custom markup systems out there these days. Every Wiki has it's own syntactical quirks, while packages like Markdown, Textile, BBCode (in dozens of variants), reStructuredText offer easy ways of hooking markup conversion in to existing applications. When it comes to being totally over-implemented and infuratingly inconsistent, markup systems are rapidly catching up with template packages. Never one to miss out on an opportunity to reinvent the wheel, I've worked on several of each ;)

My most recent markup handling attempt has just been published as part of my SitePoint article on Bookmarklets (cl iché). It's a structured markup language in a bookmarklet: activate the bookmarklet to convert the text in any textarea on a page to XHTML. The syntax is ridiculously simple, and serves my limited needs just fine:

= This is a header

Here is a paragraph.

* This is a list of items
* Another item in the list

Converts to:

<h4>This is a header</h4>

<p>Here is a paragraph.</p>

<ul>
 <li>This is a list of items</li>
 <li>Another item in the list</li>
</ul>

The algorithm is simple, and easily portable to any language you care to mention:

1. Normalise newlines to \n, for cross-platform consistency.
2. Split the text up on double newlines, to create a list of blocks.
3. For each block:
   1. If it starts with an equals sign, wrap it in header tags.
   2. If it starts with an asterisk, split it in to lines, make each a list item (stripping off the asterisk at the start of the line if required) and glue them all together inside a <ul>.
   3. Otherwise, wrap it in a <p> tag provided it doesn't have one already.
4. Glue everything back together again with a couple of newlines, to make the underlying XHTML look pretty.

The bookmarklet comes in two flavours: Expand HTML Shorthand (the full version) and Expand HTML Shorthand IE, which loses header support in order to fit within IE's rippling 508 character limit. A more capable bookmarklet could be built using the import-script-stub method described in my article, but the implementation of such a thing is left as an exercise for the reader (I've always wanted to say that).

Incidentally, there's a very common bug in markup systems that allow inline styles that proves extremely difficult to fix: that of improperly nested tags. Say you have a system where *text* is bold and _text_ is italic; what happens when the user enters _italic*italic-bold_bold*? Most systems (and that includes Markdown, Textile and my home-rolled Python solution) use naive regular expressions for inline markup processing and will output vadly formed XHTML: <em>italic<strong>italic-bold</em>bold </strong>. To truly solve this problem requires a context-sensitive parser, which involves an unpleasantly large amount of effort to solve what looks like a simple bug.

img.rollover {
  mouseover: rollover_handler;
  mouseout: rollout_handler;
}