Friday, March 16, 2007
XML Newsletter
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The Email for XML.com Subscribers
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Dear Reader,
Welcome to another issue of XML.com.
Does Web 2.0 have a data model? Does it need one? As the Web 2.0 thing
matures and grows -- yeah, I'm bracketing the business angle *for now* --
I wonder whether there will be a next stage in the growth of mashups. Most
of them, so far, have been relatively lightweight. I love lightweight,
since gains from small steps are often the sweetest.
Facebook's recent announcement of FQL, Facebook Query Language, confirms a
sort of prediction I made a few years ago, at the beginning of the Web 2.0
thing, when I said that we'd start to see sites exposing their data via
query languages, rather than through APIs. I thought at the time that
SPARQL, the RDF query language nearing standardization in the W3C, would
be a decent candidate technology, since its data model, RDF, is pretty
flexible and expressive. It's relatively easy to map existing data sources
into RDF and do queries at that level -- a nice integration trick that
works pretty well in practice.
The difference, of course, is that FQL isn't really meant to be a query
language over disparate Web 2.0 data sources, but, rather over just one.
Returning to the biz angle, one other prediction I'm confident making is
that if there is a business case for querying over multiple third-party
data sources, then people will either use SPARQL or will reinvent
something very much like it. If the latter, I just hope they reinvent
something *better*.
This week Andrew Newman discusses SPARQL as a kind of relational query
language for web data.
A Relational View of the Semantic Web
http://www.xml.com/pub/a/2007/03/14/a-relational-view-of-the-semantic-web.html
Recent XML.com Weblog Highlights
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Rick Jelliffe, The Attacks on ISO
http://www.oreillynet.com/xml/blog/2007/03/the_attacks_on_iso.html
Kurt Cagle, Is XML Doomed?
http://www.oreillynet.com/xml/blog/2007/03/is_xml_doomed.html
Yet Another Weekly Tab Sweep
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Monads through Pictures
http://www.bolour.com/papers/monads-through-pictures.html
This is the 17th time I've read something, hoping that it would make the
light bulb go off in my head about monads. I started reading about and
playing very superficially with Haskell many years ago, before it became
all the rage. I still don't really get it, and monads are part of the
problem.
This piece reminds me of an old-but-still-good XML.com piece by my friend,
Bijan Parsia:
Functional Programming and XML
http://www.xml.com/pub/a/2001/02/14/functional.html
Which includes a section on HaXml, a Haskell library for handling XML.
The Prestige (film) entry at Wikipedia
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Prestige_(film)
I watched The Prestige on Comcast HD on Demand last weekend and loved it,
despite figuring out the conceit too early, which sorta spoiled the
dramatic tension. (No, this never happens; I'm always really dumb during
movies...)
Japanese Sewers
http://www.frogview.com/show.php?file=1562
Hard to believe these are real; amazing.
Restoration Comedy entry at Wikipedia
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Restoration_comedy
Another movie last weekend put me in mind of the class I had as a
sophomore at University of Houston on comedy and drama of the Restoration;
one of my favorite classes ever, mostly, I think, because I like double
entendre and comedies of manners. Another fav, Oscar Wilde, has a play, The
Importance of Being Earnest, that is inconceivable without Restoration comedies
two hundred years earlier.
Rethinking Homework
http://www.alfiekohn.org/teaching/rethinkinghomework.htm
If all goes according to plan, I'll be a parent for the first time in late
September, so I'm rereading all the Alfie Kohn stuff I have. I find the
prospect of being a parent slightly terrifying, but Kohn is so reasonable
and lucid, that I may just manage the job without inflicting *too* much
damage!
Improve your forms using HTML5!
http://dev.opera.com/articles/view/improve-your-forms-using-html5/
I briefly considered writing an editorial this week about how the W3C's
utter capitulation to WHATWG and the browser vendors on the future of HTML
was a crucial event, but then I realized, why bother? The handwriting has
been on the wall about this one for some time, and there's not much new to
say.
It is quite remarkable, however, to think about the real HTML 5 (whatever
it's called, it won't be XHTML 1 or 2!) won't be XML or SGML, apparently.
It not being XML is a total repudiation of a good deal of what the W3C has
done for the past, what, 5 years? 8? 10?
Maybe I'm totally wrong about this; if you think so, I'd love to hear
another take that's less dreary.
Linutop
I want one...
Finally, a short note about my inclusion last week of explicitly political
content. Three responses, all of them critical. I expected equal numbers
of supportive and critical notes. But, most curious, two of the replies
were exceptionally rude. The Net is an irreplaceable thing, but it didn't
encourage people to be rude to strangers. That's really an awful,
perpetual bug. I have this fantasy that the generation that never lived
without email will revert to the civilized practice of treating strangers
with civility and courtesy whenever possible. One can always hope.
As always, thanks for reading.
Kendall Clark
kendall@xml.com
Managing Editor, XML.com
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