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Gary Edwards

Why a JavaScript hater thinks everyone needs to learn JavaScript in the next year - O'R... - 1 views

radar.oreilly.com/...time-to-learn-javascript.html

JavaScript HTML+ Node.JS JQuery web-apps web-application-development

shared by Gary Edwards on 07 Jun 11 - No Cached
  • some extremely important game-changers: jQuery, JSON, Node.js, and HTML5.
  • .js has the potential to revolutionize web development. It is a framework for building high performance web applications: applications that can respond very quickly and efficiently to a high volume of incoming requests.
  • Google has started a revolution in JavaScript performance.
  • ...11 more annotations...
  • the number of JavaScript developers is huge.
  • HTML5 is about JavaScript
  • The power of HTML5 lies in what these tags allow you to create in JavaScript.
  • HTML5, then, isn't really a major advance in angle-bracket-based tagging; it's about enabling JavaScr
  • pt to do more powerful things
  • JavaScript has long been the workhorse for implementing dynamic features in HTML. But there have always been two problems: browser incompatibilities, and the awkwardness of working directly with the DOM. The JQuery library has elegantly solved both problems, and is the basis for modern client-side browser development.
  • The use of JavaScript has also exploded in databases.
  • document databases
  • for all three databases, a "document" means a JSON document, not a Word or Excel file.
  • JSON is really just a format for serializing JavaScript objects.
  • Web servers, rich web client libraries, HTML5, databases, even JavaScript-based languages: I see JavaScript everywhere.
  • Gary Edwards on 07 Jun 11
     
    OK, this article gets my vote as the most important read of the year.  We all know that the the Web is the future of both computing and communications/connectivity.  But wha tis the future of the Web?  Uber coder Mike Loukides says it's JavaScript, and what a compelling case he builds.  This is a must read.  Key concepts are diigo highlighted :) excerpt: JavaScript has "grown up." I'm sure there are many JavaScript developers who would take issue with that judgement, and argue that JavaScript has been a capable, mature, and under-appreciated language all along. They may be right, though you can write any program in any complete programming language, including awful things like BASIC. What makes a language useful is some combination of the language's expressiveness and the libraries and tools available. JavaScript clearly passed the expressiveness barrier a long time ago, even if the ceremony required for creating objects is distasteful. But recently, we've seen some extremely important game-changers: jQuery, JSON, Node.js, and HTML5. JavaScript may have been a perfectly adequate language in the past, but these changes (and a few others that I'll point out) have made JavaScript a language that is essential for every developer to know. If there's one language you need to learn in the next year, it's JavaScript. Insightful comment: HTML5 is a JavaScript API, introducing new elements but significantly redefining ALL elements as objects or classes.  Elements can be expressed with tags.  Or, you can use DOM JavaScripting to create elements. 
Gary Edwards

HTML5 Can Get the Job, But Can HTML5 Do the Job? - 2 views

www.readwriteweb.com/...l5-can-get-the-job-but-can.php

HTML5 mobile-apps HTML+ HTML-CSS-JavaScript OpenWeb-Productivity-Platform Cows

shared by Gary Edwards on 09 Aug 11 - No Cached
  • Gary Edwards on 09 Aug 11
     
    Great chart and HTM5 App development advice from pinch/zoom developer Brian Fling!   excerpt: In a post on pinch/zoom's blog Swipe, Fling discusses the "Anatomy of a HTML5 Mobile App" and what developers will need to get started, what the pitfalls are and why HTML5 is so difficult. HTML5 is a lot like HTML, just more advanced. Fling says that "if you know HTML, then chances are you'll understand what's new in HTML5 in under an hour." Yet, he also says that HTML5 is almost nothing without Javascript and CSS. Device detection, offline data, Javascript tools, testing, debugging and themes are issues that need to be resolved with the tools at hand. One of the big challenges that developers face is the need to fully comprehend Javascript. That starts from the most basic of codes on up. Fling says that many developers cannot write Javascript without the aid of frameworks like Prototype, MooTools, jQuery or Scriptaculous. That would not be so much of a problem if all an application consisted of was functionality and theme, but the data and multiple device requirements of apps and working with the HTML5 code means that troubleshooting a Web application can be extremely difficult if a developer does not know what to look for in Javascript. Fling breaks down the three parts of the Javascript stack that is required in building HTML5 apps - hybrid, core and device scripts. Then there is CSS. Fling likens CSS to the make, model, interior and attention to detail of a car. "Javascript definitely influences our experience as well, but they are the machinations out of view," Fling wrote. "We absolutely need it to be there, but as any Top Gear fan can tell you - power under the hood doesn't always equal a powerful experience." So, HTML5 can get the job. But can it do the job? Fling says yes, but with these caveats:
Gary Edwards

Discoverer of JSON Recommends Suspension of HTML5 | Web Security Journal - 0 views

security.sys-con.com/1544072

Douglas-Crawford HTML5-XSS XSS compound-documents

shared by Gary Edwards on 16 May 12 - No Cached
  • Gary Edwards on 16 May 12
     
    Fascinating conversation between Douglas Crockford and Jeremy Geelan. The issue is that XSS - the Cross Site Scripting capabilities of HTML. and "the painful gap" in the HTML5 specification of the itnerface between JavaScript and the browser. I had to use the Evernote Clearly Chrome extension to read this page. Microsoft is running a huge JavaScript advertisement/pointer that totally blocks the page with no way of closing or escaping. Incredible. Clearly was able to knock it out though. Nicely done! The HTML5-XSS problem is very important, especially if your someone like me that sees the HTML+ format (HTML5-CSS3-JSON-JavaScript-SVG/Canvas) as the undisputed Cloud Productivity Platform "compound document" model. The XSS discussion goes right to the heart of matter of creating an HTML compound document in much the same way that a MSOffice Productivity Compound Document worked. The XSS mimics the functionality of of embedded compound document components such as OLE, DDE, ODBC and Scripting. Crack open any client/server business document and it will be found to be loaded with these embeded components. It seems to me that any one of the Cloud Productivity Platform contenders could solve the HTML-XSS problem. I'm thinking Google Apps, Zoho, SalesForce.com, RackSpace and Amazon - with gApps and Zoho clearly leading the charge. Also let me add that RSS and XMP (Jabber), while not normally mentioned with JSON, ought to be considered. Twitter uses RSS to transport and connect data. Jabber is of course a long time favorite of mine. excerpt: The fundamental mistake in HTML5 was one of prioritization. It should have tackled the browser's most important problem first. Once the platform was secured, then shiny new features could be carefully added. There is much that is attractive about HTML5. But ultimately the thing that made the browser into a credible application delivery system was JavaScript, the ultimate workaround tool. There is a painful gap
Gary Edwards

Beyond jQuery: JavaScript tools for the HTML5 generation | HTML5 - InfoWorld - 0 views

www.infoworld.com/...ls-the-html5-generation-178437

Javascript-library JQuery TreeSaver

shared by Gary Edwards on 09 Nov 11 - No Cached
  • Gary Edwards on 09 Nov 11
     
    Good article covering lots of JavaScript Libraries and their specific uses. excerpt:  Over drinks, one person proclaimed, "No one programs in JavaScript, they just string together jQuery calls." This statement is certainly not true, but like a hand grenade, it gets close enough to make its point. jQuery sure seems to be everywhere, and with good reason: Its creators took all of the neat ideas from libraries like Prototype, Dojo, and Yahoo's YUI, then turned them into something that was just a tad easier to use. When jQuery nurtured fertile plug-in culture, the library became irreplaceable. One seemingly random estimate claimed that at least 70 percent of JavaScript is jQuery. While there is probably no scientific way to make such a blanket statement, the fact that someone would try is good enough.
Gary Edwards

ODF Plugfest: Making office tools interoperable [LWN.net] - 0 views

lwn.net/410387

webodf ODF1.2 ODF HTML+ WebKit Gecko QTWebKit

shared by Gary Edwards on 10 Nov 10 - No Cached
  • ODF on the web An especially interesting project that was presented is WebODF, which wants to bring ODF to the web. Jos van den Oever started from the observation that a lot of office suites are moving into the "cloud". Examples are Microsoft Live Office, Google Docs, and Zoho. But where are the free software alternatives for the cloud? For OpenOffice.org, KOffice, AbiWord, and Gnumeric, there are none that have a cloud version with ODF support. That was the motivation for Jos to start a project to fill in this gap and let users view and edit ODF documents on the web without losing control of the document into some company's servers. The strategy Jos followed was to use just HTML and JavaScript for the web application. The application then loads the XML stream of the ODF document as is into the HTML document and puts it into the DOM tree. Styling is done by applying CSS rules that are directly derived from the <office:styles> and <office:automatic-styles> elements in the ODF document. That is how WebODF was born; it is a project with the initial goal of creating a simple ODF viewer and editor for offline and online use, implemented in HTML5. The small code base consists of one HTML5 file and eight JavaScript files, each of which is a few hundred lines of code. The most interesting part is that it doesn't need server-side code execution: the JavaScript code is executed in the user's browser and saving the document to the web server is done using WebDAV. It supports both the Gecko and WebKit HTML engines. There is also an implementation on top of QtWebKit, which is for better desktop integration, and an ODFKit implementation. This means that WebODF is an easy way to add ODF support to almost any application, be it in HTML, Gtk, or QML. KO GmbH has received funding from NLnet to improve the current WebODF prototype and see how far the idea goes. Interested readers can try the online demo.
  • Gary Edwards on 10 Nov 10
     
    Notification of this article also appeared in the Diigo Document Wars Group..... WebODF...   An especially interesting project that was presented is WebODF, which wants to bring ODF to the web. Jos van den Oever started from the observation that a lot of office suites are moving into the "cloud". Examples are Microsoft Live Office, Google Docs, and Zoho. But where are the free software alternatives for the cloud? For OpenOffice.org, KOffice, AbiWord, and Gnumeric, there are none that have a cloud version with ODF support. That was the motivation for Jos to start a project to fill in this gap and let users view and edit ODF documents on the web without losing control of the document into some company's servers. The strategy Jos followed was to use just HTML and JavaScript for the web application. The application then loads the XML stream of the ODF document as is into the HTML document and puts it into the DOM tree. Styling is done by applying CSS rules that are directly derived from the and elements in the ODF document. That is how WebODF was born; it is a project with the initial goal of creating a simple ODF viewer and editor for offline and online use, implemented in HTML5. The small code base consists of one HTML5 file and eight JavaScript files, each of which is a few hundred lines of code. The most interesting part is that it doesn't need server-side code execution: the JavaScript code is executed in the user's browser and saving the document to the web server is done using WebDAV. It supports both the Gecko and WebKit HTML engines. There is also an implementation on top of QtWebKit, which is for better desktop integration, and an ODFKit implementation. This means that WebODF is an easy way to add ODF support to almost any application, be it in HTML, Gtk, or QML. KO GmbH has received funding from NLnet to improve the current WebODF prototype and see how far the idea goes. Interested readers can try the online demo
Gary Edwards

Overview of apps for Office 2013 - 0 views

msdn.microsoft.com/...jj220082(v=office.15)

MSOffice-Web-Apps MSCloud-Developer

shared by Gary Edwards on 25 Aug 12 - No Cached
  • Gary Edwards on 25 Aug 12
     
    MSOffice is now "Web ready".  The Office apps are capable of running HTML5-JavaScript apps based on a simple Web page model.  Think of this as the Office apps being fitted with a browser, and developers writing extensions to run in that browser using HTML5 and JavaScript.  Microsoft provides an Office.js library and, a developer "Web App/Page Creator"  Visual Basic toolset called "Napa" Office 365 Development Tools.  Lots of project templates. Key MSOffice apps are Word, Excel, PowerPoint and Outlook.  Develop for Office or SharePoint.  Apps can be hosted on any Web Server. excerpt: Microsoft Office 2013 Developer Environment with HTML5, XML and JavaScript.  Office.js library. "his documentation is preliminary and is subject to change. Published: July 16, 2012 Learn how to use apps for Office to extend your Office 2013 Preview applications. This new Office solution type, apps for Office, built on web technologies like HTML, CSS, JavaScript, REST, OData, and OAuth. It provides new experiences within Office applications by surfacing web technologies and cloud services right within Office documents, email messages, meeting requests, and appointments. Applies to:  Excel Web App Preview | Exchange 2013 Preview | Outlook 2013 Preview | Outlook Web App Preview | Project Professional 2013 Preview | Word 2013 Preview | Excel 2013 Preview  In this article What is an app for Office? Anatomy of an app for Office Types of apps for Office What can an app for Office do? Understanding the runtime Development basics Create your first app for Office Publishing basics Scenarios Components of an app for Office solution Software requirements"
Gary Edwards

XML Production Workflows? Start with the Web and XHTML - 1 views

quod.lib.umich.edu/...n-workflows-start-with-the-web

OpenWeb XML XHTML-CSS HTML5-CSS3-JavaScript IDML

shared by Gary Edwards on 01 Nov 13 - No Cached
  • Challenges: Some Ugly Truths The challenges of building—and living with—an XML workflow are clear enough. The return on investment is a long-term proposition. Regardless of the benefits XML may provide, the starting reality is that it represents a very different way of doing things than the one we are familiar with. The Word Processing and Desktop Publishing paradigm, based on the promise of onscreen, WYSIWYG layout, is so dominant as to be practically inescapable. It has proven really hard to get from here to there, no matter how attractive XML might be on paper. A considerable amount of organizational effort and labour must be expended up front in order to realize the benefits. This is why XML is often referred to as an “investment”: you sink a bunch of time and money up front, and realize the benefits—greater flexibility, multiple output options, searching and indexing, and general futureproofing—later, over the long haul. It is not a short-term return proposition. And, of course, the returns you are able to realize from your XML investment are commensurate with what you put in up front: fine-grained, semantically rich tagging is going to give you more potential for searchability and recombination than a looser, more general-purpose approach, but it sure costs more. For instance, the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI) is the grand example of pouring enormous amounts of energy into the up-front tagging, with a very open-ended set of possibilities down the line. TEI helpfully defines a level to which most of us do not have to aspire.[5] But understanding this on a theoretical level is only part of the challenge. There are many practical issues that must be addressed. Software and labour are two of the most critical. How do you get the content into XML in the first place? Unfortunately, despite two decades of people doing SGML and XML, this remains an ugly question.
  • Practical Challenges In 2009, there is still no truly likeable—let alone standard—editing and authoring software for XML. For many (myself included), the high-water mark here was Adobe’s FrameMaker, substantially developed by the late 1990s. With no substantial market for it, it is relegated today mostly to the tech writing industry, unavailable for the Mac, and just far enough afield from the kinds of tools we use today that its adoption represents a significant hurdle. And FrameMaker was the best of the breed; most of the other software in decent circulation are programmers’ tools—the sort of things that, as Michael Tamblyn pointed out, encourage editors to drink at their desks. The labour question represents a stumbling block as well. The skill-sets and mind-sets that effective XML editors need have limited overlap with those needed by literary and more traditional production editors. The need to think of documents as machine-readable databases is not something that comes naturally to folks steeped in literary culture. In combination with the sheer time and effort that rich tagging requires, many publishers simply outsource the tagging to India, drawing a division of labour that spans oceans, to put it mildly. Once you have XML content, then what do you do with it? How do you produce books from it? Presumably, you need to be able to produce print output as well as digital formats. But while the latter are new enough to be generally XML-friendly (e-book formats being largely XML based, for instance), there aren’t any straightforward, standard ways of moving XML content into the kind of print production environments we are used to seeing. This isn’t to say that there aren’t ways of getting print—even very high-quality print—output from XML, just that most of them involve replacing your prepress staff with Java programmers.
  • Why does this have to be so hard? It’s not that XML is new, or immature, or untested. Remember that the basics have been around, and in production, since the early 1980s at least. But we have to take account of a substantial and long-running cultural disconnect between traditional editorial and production processes (the ones most of us know intimately) and the ways computing people have approached things. Interestingly, this cultural divide looked rather different in the 1970s, when publishers were looking at how to move to digital typesetting. Back then, printers and software developers could speak the same language. But that was before the ascendancy of the Desktop Publishing paradigm, which computerized the publishing industry while at the same time isolating it culturally. Those of us who learned how to do things the Quark way or the Adobe way had little in common with people who programmed databases or document-management systems. Desktop publishing technology isolated us in a smooth, self-contained universe of toolbars, grid lines, and laser proofs. So, now that the reasons to get with this program, XML, loom large, how can we bridge this long-standing divide?
  • ...44 more annotations...
  • Using the Web as a Production Platform The answer, I think, is right in front of you. The bridge is the Web, a technology and platform that is fundamentally based on XML, and which many publishers are by now comfortably familiar with. Perhaps not entirely comfortably, but at least most publishers are already working with the Web; they already either know or have on staff people who understand it and can work with it. The foundation of our argument is this: rather than looking at jumping to XML in its full, industrial complexity, which seems to be what the O'Reilly-backed StartWithXML initiative[6] is suggesting, publishers instead leverage existing tools and technologies—starting with the Web—as a means of getting XML workflows in place. This means making small investments and working with known tools rather than spending tens of thousands of dollars on XML software and rarefied consultants. It means re-thinking how the existing pieces of the production toolchain fit together; re-thinking the existing roles of software components already in use. It means, fundamentally, taking the Web seriously as a content platform, rather than thinking of it as something you need to get content out to, somehow. If nothing else, the Web represents an opportunity to think about editorial and production from outside the shrink-wrapped Desktop Publishing paradigm.
  • Is the Web made of Real XML? At this point some predictable objections can be heard: wait a moment, the Web isn’t really made out of XML; the HTML that makes up most of the Web is at best the bastard child of SGML, and it is far too flaky/unstructured/underpowered to be taken seriously. We counter by arguing that although HTML on the Web exists in a staggering array of different incarnations, and that the majority of it is indeed an unstructured mess, this does not undermine the general principle that basic, ubiquitous Web technologies can make a solid platform for content management, editorial process, and production workflow.
  • With the advent of a published XML standard in the late 1990s came the W3C’s adoption of XHTML: the realization of the Web’s native content markup as a proper XML document type. Today, its acceptance is almost ubiquitous, even while the majority of actual content out there may not be strictly conforming. The more important point is that most contemporary Web software, from browsers to authoring tools to content management systems (from blogs to enterprise systems), are capable of working with clean, valid XHTML. Or, to put the argument the other way around, clean, valid XHTML content plays absolutely seamlessly with everything else on the Web.[7]
  • The objection which follows, then, will be that even if we grant that XHTML is a real XML document type, that it is underpowered for “serious” content because it is almost entirely presentation (formatting) oriented; it lacks any semantic depth. In XHTML, a paragraph is a paragraph is a paragraph, as opposed to a section or an epigraph or a summary.
  • n contrast, more “serious” XML document types like DocBook[8] or DITA-derived schemas[9] are capable of making semantic distinctions about content chunks at a fine level of granularity and with a high degree of specificity.
  • So there is an argument for recalling the 80:20 rule here. If XHTML can provide 80% of the value with just 20% of the investment, then what exactly is the business case for spending the other 80% to achieve that last 20% of value? We suspect the ratio is actually quite a bit steeper than 80:20 for most publishers.
  • Furthermore, just to get technical for a moment, XHTML is extensible in a fairly straightforward way, through the common “class” attribute on each element. Web developers have long leveraged this kind of extensibility in the elaboration of “microformats” for semantic-web applications.[10] There is no reason why publishers shouldn’t think to use XHTML’s simple extensibility in a similar way for their own ends.
  • XHTML, on the other hand, is supported by a vast array of quotidian software, starting with the ubiquitous Web browser. For this very reason, XHTML is in fact employed as a component part of several more specialized document types (ONIX and ePub among them).
  • Why re-invent a general-purpose prose representation when XHTML already does the job?
  • It is worth pausing for a moment to consider the role of XHTML in the ePub standard for ebook content. An ePub file is, anatomically, a simply disguised zip archive. Inside the zip archive are a few standard component parts: there are specialized files that declare metadata about the book, and about the format of the book. And then there is the book’s content, represented in XHTML. An ePub book is a Web page in a wrapper.
  • To sum up the general argument: the Web as it already exists presents incredible value to publishers, as a platform for doing XML content management with existing (and often free) tools, and without having to go blindly into the unknown. At this point, we can offer a few design guidelines: prefer existing and/or ubiquitous tools over specialized ones wherever possible; prefer free software over proprietary systems where possible; prefer simple tools controlled and coordinated by human beings over fully automated (and therefore complex) systems; play to our strengths: use Web software for storing and managing content, use layout software for layout, and keep editors and production people in charge of their own domains.
  • Putting the Pieces Together: A Prototype
  • At the SFU Master of Publishing Program, we have been chipping away at this general line of thinking for a few years. Over that time, Web content management systems have been getting more and more sophisticated, all the while getting more streamlined and easier to use. (NB: if you have a blog, you have a Web content management system.) The Web is beginning to be recognized as a writing and editing environment used by millions of people. And the ways in which content is represented, stored, and exchanged online have become increasingly robust and standardized.
  • The missing piece of the puzzle has been print production: how can we move content from its malleable, fluid form on line into the kind of high-quality print production environments we’ve come to expect after two decades of Desktop Publishing?
  • Anyone who has tried to print Web content knows that the existing methods leave much to be desired (hyphenation and justification, for starters). In the absence of decent tools for this, most publishers quite naturally think of producing the print content first, and then think about how to get material onto the Web for various purposes. So we tend to export from Word, or from Adobe, as something of an afterthought.
  • While this sort of works, it isn’t elegant, and it completely ignores the considerable advantages of Web-based content management.
  • Content managed online is stored in one central location, accessible simultaneously to everyone in your firm, available anywhere you have an Internet connection, and usually exists in a much more fluid format than Word files. If only we could manage the editorial flow online, and then go to print formats at the end, instead of the other way around. At SFU, we made several attempts to make this work by way of the supposed “XML import” capabilities of various Desktop Publishing tools, without much success.[12]
  • In the winter of 2009, Adobe solved this part of the problem for us with the introduction of its Creative Suite 4. What CS4 offers is the option of a complete XML representation of an InDesign document: what Adobe calls IDML (InDesign Markup Language).
  • The IDML file format is—like ePub—a simply disguised zip archive that, when unpacked, reveals a cluster of XML files that represent all the different facets of an InDesign document: layout spreads, master pages, defined styles, colours, and of course, the content.
  • IDML is a well thought-out XML standard that achieves two very different goals simultaneously: it preserves all of the information that InDesign needs to do what it does; and it is broken up in a way that makes it possible for mere mortals (or at least our Master of Publishing students) to work with it.
  • What this represented to us in concrete terms was the ability to take Web-based content and move it into InDesign in a straightforward way, thus bridging Web and print production environments using existing tools and skillsets, with a little added help from free software.
  • We would take clean XHTML content, transform it to IDML-marked content, and merge that with nicely designed templates in InDesign.
  • The result is an almost push-button publication workflow, which results in a nice, familiar InDesign document that fits straight into the way publishers actually do production.
  • Tracing the steps To begin with, we worked backwards, moving the book content back to clean XHTML.
  • The simplest method for this conversion—and if you want to create Web content, this is an excellent route—was to use Adobe’s “Export to Digital Editions” option, which creates an ePub file.
  • Recall that ePub is just XHTML in a wrapper, so within the ePub file was a relatively clean XHTML document. It was somewhat cleaner (that is, the XHTML tagging was simpler and less cluttered) than InDesign’s other Web-oriented exports, possibly because Digital Editions is a well understood target, compared with somebody’s website.
  • In order to achieve our target of clean XHTML, we needed to do some editing; the XHTML produced by InDesign’s “Digital Editions” export was presentation-oriented. For instance, bulleted list items were tagged as paragraphs, with a class attribute identifying them as list items. Using the search-and-replace function, we converted such structures to proper XHTML list and list-item elements. Our guiding principle was to make the XHTML as straightforward as possible, not dependent on any particular software to interpret it.
  • We broke the book’s content into individual chapter files; each chapter could then carry its own basic metadata, and the pages conveniently fit our Web content management system (which is actually just a wiki). We assembled a dynamically generated table of contents for the 12 chapters, and created a cover page. Essentially, the book was entirely Web-based at this point.
  • When the book chapters are viewed online, they are formatted via a CSS2 stylesheet that defines a main column for content as well as dedicating screen real estate for navigational elements. We then created a second template to render the content for exporting; this was essentially a bare-bones version of the book with no navigation and minimal styling. Pages (or even the entire book) can be exported (via the “Save As...” function in a Web browser) for use in either print production or ebook conversion. At this point, we required no skills beyond those of any decent Web designer.
  • Integrating with CS4 for Print Adobe’s IDML language defines elements specific to InDesign; there is nothing in the language that looks remotely like XHTML. So a mechanical transformation step is needed to convert the XHTML content into something InDesign can use. This is not as hard as it might seem.
  • Both XHTML and IDML are composed of straightforward, well-documented structures, and so transformation from one to the other is, as they say, “trivial.” We chose to use XSLT (Extensible Stylesheet Language Transforms) to do the work. XSLT is part of the overall XML specification, and thus is very well supported in a wide variety of tools. Our prototype used a scripting engine called xsltproc, a nearly ubiquitous piece of software that we found already installed as part of Mac OS X (contemporary Linux distributions also have this as a standard tool), though any XSLT processor would work.
  • In other words, we don’t need to buy InCopy, because we just replaced it with the Web. Our wiki is now plugged directly into our InDesign layout. It even automatically updates the InDesign document when the content changes. Credit is due at this point to Adobe: this integration is possible because of the open file format in the Creative Suite 4.
  • We wrote an XSLT transformation script[18] that converted the XHTML content from the Web into an InCopy ICML file. The script itself is less than 500 lines long, and was written and debugged over a period of about a week by amateurs (again, the people named at the start of this article). The script runs in a couple of seconds, and the resulting .icml file can then be “placed” directly into an InDesign template. The ICML file references an InDesign stylesheet, so the template file can be set up with a house-styled layout, master pages, and stylesheet definitions for paragraphs and character ranges.
  • Rather than a public-facing website, our system relies on the Web as a content management platform—of course a public face could easily be added.
  • It should be noted that the Book Publishing 1 proof-of-concept was artificially complex; we began with a book laid out in InDesign and ended up with a look-alike book laid out in InDesign. But next time—for instance, when we publish Book Publishing 2—we can begin the process with the content on the Web, and keep it there throughout the editorial process. The book’s content could potentially be written and edited entirely online, as Web content, and then automatically poured into an InDesign template at proof time. “Just in time,” as they say. This represents an entirely new way of thinking of book production. With a Web-first orientation, it makes little sense to think of the book as “in print” or “out of print”—the book is simply available, in the first place online; in the second place in derivative digital formats; and third, but really not much more difficult, in print-ready format, via the usual InDesign CS print production system publishers are already familiar with.
  • Creating Ebook Files Creating electronic versions from XHTML source is vastly simpler than trying to generate these out of the existing print process. The ePub version is extremely easy to generate; so is online marketing copy or excerpts for the Web, since the content begins life Web-native.
  • Since an ePub file is essentially XHTML content in a special wrapper, all that is required is that we properly “wrap” our XHTML content. Ideally, the content in an ePub file is broken into chapters (as ours was) and a table of contents file is generated in order to allow easy navigation within an ebook reader. We used Julian Smart’s free tool eCub[19] to simply and automatically generate the ePub wrapper and the table of contents. The only custom development we did was to create a CSS stylesheet for the ebook so that headings and paragraph indents looked the way we wanted. Starting with XHTML content, creating ePub is almost too easy.
  • today, we are able to put the process together using nothing but standard, relatively ubiquitous Web tools: the Web itself as an editing and content management environment, standard Web scripting tools for the conversion process, and the well-documented IDML file format to integrate the layout tool.
  • Our project demonstrates that Web technologies are indeed good enough to use in an XML-oriented workflow; more specialized and expensive options are not necessarily required. For massive-scale enterprise publishing, this approach may not offer enough flexibility, and the challenge of adding and extracting extra semantic richness may prove more trouble than it's worth.
  • But for smaller firms who are looking at the straightforward benefits of XML-based processes—single source publishing, online content and workflow management, open and accessible archive formats, greater online discoverability—here is a way forward.
  • The result is very simple and easy to use. Our demonstration requires that a production editor run the XSLT transformation script manually, but there is no reason why this couldn’t be built directly into the Web content management system so that exporting the content to print ran the transformation automatically. The resulting file would then be “placed” in InDesign and proofed.
  • The final piece of our puzzle, the ability to integrate print production, was made possible by Adobe's release of InDesign with an open XML file format. Since the Web's XHTML is also XML, is can be easily and confidently transformed to the InDesign format.
  • Such a workflow—beginning with the Web and exporting to print—is surely more in line with the way we will do business in the 21st century, where the Web is the default platform for reaching audiences, developing content, and putting the pieces together. It is time, we suggest, for publishers to re-orient their operations and start with the Web.
  • Using the Web as a Production Platform
  • Gary Edwards on 01 Nov 13
     
    I was looking for an answer to a problem Marbux had presented, and found this interesting article.  The issue was that of the upcoming conversion of the Note Case Pro (NCP) layout engine to the WebKit layout engine, and what to do about the NCP document format. My initial reaction was to encode the legacy NCP document format in XML, and run an XSLT to a universal pivot format like TEI-XML.  From there, the TEI-XML community would provide all the XSLT transformation routines for conversion to ODF, OOXML, XHTML, ePUB and HTML/CSS. Researching the problems one might encounter with this approach, I found this article.  Fascinating stuff. My take away is that TEI-XML would not be as effective a "universal pivot point" as XHTML.  Or perhaps, if NCP really wants to get aggressive; IDML - InDesign Markup Language. As an after thought, i was thinking that an alternative title to this article might have been, "Working with Web as the Center of Everything".
Gary Edwards

Chrome Developer Tools: Remote Debugging - Google Chrome Developer Tools - Google Code - 0 views

code.google.com/...remote-debugging.html

chrome-webkit developer-tool-interface HTML5-CSS3 JSON OTXML

shared by Gary Edwards on 20 May 11 - No Cached
  • Gary Edwards on 20 May 11
     
    Incredible.  I'm wondering if either Jason or florian has thought about using the Chrome JSON messaging layer to expose docx conversions to OTXML?  Essentially, when Florian breaks a .docx document, he only deals with the objects and how they are positioned (layout) on a page.  Once captured and described, these xObjects could then be converted to JSON.  The Chrome web client/ web server port (9222) could then, theoretically be used to observe the JSON xObjects?  Interesting. intro:  Under the hood, Chrome Developer Tools is a web application written in HTML, JavaScript and CSS. It has a special binding available at JavaScript runtime that allows interacting with chrome pages and instrumenting them. Interaction protocol consists of commands that are sent to the page and events that the page is generating. Although Chrome Developer Tools is the only client of this protocol, there are ways for third parties to bypass it and start instrumenting browser pages explicitly. We will describe the ways it could be done below. Contents Protocol Debugging over the wire Using debugger extension API
Gary Edwards

New tools for web design and development: May 2013 | Feature | .net magazine - 1 views

www.netmagazine.com/...esign-and-development-may-2013

JavaScript-tools

shared by Gary Edwards on 08 Jun 13 - No Cached
  • Gary Edwards on 08 Jun 13
     
    Quick review of a new crop of Web Development - JavaScript tools.  Includes ICE Coder! "The crop of new development tools this month is rich and varied. Taking in web-based IDEs, testing tools, programming paradigms and more, there's enough raw material here to entertain a keen mind for months. If you wanted to be selective you could just study and apply new approaches like lazy loading, or reactive programming. Or maybe you'd prefer to tighten cross-platform consistency with GhostLab. And, if you're feeling particularly clever, you could explore the possibilities of deploying a Bunny 'darknet' from your coffee shop armchair."
Paul Merrell

In Cryptography, Advances in Program Obfuscation | Simons Foundation - 0 views

www.simonsfoundation.org/...g-the-art-of-sensible-nonsense

encryption obfuscation

shared by Paul Merrell on 04 Feb 14 - No Cached
  • “A program obfuscator would be a powerful tool for finding plausible constructions for just about any cryptographic task you could conceive of,” said Yuval Ishai, of the Technion in Haifa, Israel. Precisely because of obfuscation’s power, many computer scientists, including Sahai and his colleagues, thought it was impossible. “We were convinced it was too powerful to exist,” he said. Their earliest research findings seemed to confirm this, showing that the most natural form of obfuscation is indeed impossible to achieve for all programs. Then, on July 20, 2013, Sahai and five co-authors posted a paper on the Cryptology ePrint Archive demonstrating a candidate protocol for a kind of obfuscation known as “indistinguishability obfuscation.” Two days later, Sahai and one of his co-authors, Brent Waters, of the University of Texas, Austin, posted a second paper that suggested, together with the first paper, that this somewhat arcane form of obfuscation may possess much of the power cryptographers have dreamed of. “This is the first serious positive result” when it comes to trying to find a universal obfuscator, said Boaz Barak, of Microsoft Research in Cambridge, Mass. “The cryptography community is very excited.” In the six months since the original paper was posted, more papers have appeared on the ePrint archive with “obfuscation” in the title than in the previous 17 years.
Gary Edwards

Roger Black : "We save trees" - The Story of TreeSaver - 0 views

rogerblack.com/...we_save_trees

TreeSaver WebType Filipe-Fortes HTML+ visually-immersive

shared by Gary Edwards on 08 Jun 11 - No Cached
  • Gary Edwards on 08 Jun 11
     
    Roger Black is a publication designer, and Filipe Fortes was the project manager for Microsoft's Windows Presentation Foundation - Silverlight project.  Today he specializes in dynamic layout algorithms written in Open Web JavaScript.  Roger is a reknown publication designer, and describes here the genesis behind TreeSaver.  Fascinating story certain to become a key explanation of how digital media ran away with the print publishing industry.   I'm wondering what kind of authoring tools will evolve that can publish directly into the TS JavaScript templates?   My first inclination would be to adapt OOo Impress.  It has an outline view, a notes editing capability, and provides a decent visual canvas.  The problem is that it's locked into "slides".  Can Impress be unlocked and flowing?  That might work. excerpt:  when Microsoft put together a dynamic page layout for The New York Times Reader, did they know that it was the future? It certainly wasn't the immediate present, since they couldn't pry the WPF visual layer off of Windows, leaving it a single-OS solution. (The Times' Reader later was taken up by Adobe, which at least got it to work on both Mac and PC.) Filipe Fortes, PM on the MS news client project, knew. I'd met him when the group invited me out to Redmond to help design the first templates for the Times. Later I saw him at the 2007 Mix conference in Vegas, and I asked him how to make the dynamic page size idea work multi-platform. He said, "We could do it in HTML."
Gary Edwards

Ex-Apple Javascript Guru: HTML5 and Native Apps Can Live Together: Tech News « - 0 views

gigaom.com/...arles-jolley-srpoutcore-strobe

Strobe Charles-Jolley SproutCore WebKit Mobility HTML5-Native-Client

shared by Gary Edwards on 02 Oct 10 - Cached
  • Gary Edwards on 02 Oct 10
     
    Good interview with Charles Jolley - SproutCore - WebKit (met Charles at Web 2.0).  He has left Apple and started a SproutCore Web App development company called "Strobe".  Looking very good Charles! The Blended Brew Apps have become a preferred way of accessing information on mobile devices. But developers want to provide a unified experience, and that is why Jolley believes that we will soon have apps that use HTML5 inside a native app wrapper. "People are looking for an either/or solution, but it is not going to end up like that," he said. Think of Strobe's offerings as a way to create an experience that is a blend of HTML5 and native mobile apps. How this works is that an application is developed in HTML5 instead of proprietary formats. It is wrapped in a native app wrapper for, say, the iPhone, but when accessed through a web browser on a PC or any other device, like tablet, it offers the same user experience. This is a good way to solve a problem that is only going to get compounded many fold as multiple endpoints for content start to emerge. The co-existence of web and native apps also means content publishers need to think differently about content and how it is offered to consumers. The multiplicity of endpoints (iPhone, iPad, TV and PC) is going to force content producers to think differently about how they build the user experiences for different sets of screens. Jolley argues that the best way to do so is to stop taking a document-centric view that is part of the PC-era. In the touch-based mobile device era, folks need to think of ways to have a single technology stack married to the ability to create unique experiences for different devices. And if you do that, there is no doubt that HTML5 and native apps can live in harmony.
Gary Edwards

Mobile Enterprise: Android OS, Best Practices for Developing Mobile Strategies - 0 views

www.cmswire.com/...g-mobile-strategies-009837.php

sursen AppsGeyser Titanium

shared by Gary Edwards on 18 Jan 11 - No Cached
  • Gary Edwards on 18 Jan 11
     
    Convert Content for Android OS Making your content mobile friendly is harder than it sounds. However, more tools are emerging to help companies create content for multiple platforms, from iPads to smartphones, across a variety of operating systems. Recently, AppsGeyser privately launched a web platform that allows you to convert any web content to an Android App. With AppsGeyser companies can create an Android app three ways: Grabbing any website content block or web widget Copying and pasting HTML code, JavaScript, AJAX or Flash Entering the URL of your website Nifty tool for instantly converting web site widgets into Android Apps.  Looks like a new category of tools to make legacy Web services mobile-ready.  Titanium
Gary Edwards

Adobe Edge beta brings Flash-style design to HTML5 - 2 views

arstechnica.com/...lash-style-design-to-html5.ars

Flash HTML-CSS-JavaScript JSON

shared by Gary Edwards on 01 Aug 11 - No Cached
  • Gary Edwards on 01 Aug 11
     
    While HTML5 developers are working directly with JavaScript, SVG, CSS, and other technologies, Flash designers enjoy a high-level environment with timelines, drawing tools, easy control of animation effects, and more. With Edge, released in beta Sunday, Adobe is striving to bring that same ease of use to HTML5 development. The user interface will be familiar to anyone who's used Flash or After Effects; a timeline allowing scrubbing and jumping to any point in an animation, properties panels to adjust objects, and a panel to show the actual animation. Behind the scenes, Edge uses standard HTML5. Scripting is provided by a combination of jQuery and Adobe's own scripts, and animation and styling uses both scripts and CSS. Pages produced by Edge encode the actual animations using a convenient JSON format. Edge itself embeds the WebKit rendering engine-the same one used in Apple's Safari browser and Google's Chrome-to actually display the animations.
Gary Edwards

Google plan to kill Javascript with Dart, fight off Apple * The Register - 0 views

www.theregister.co.uk/...google_project_kill_javascript

JavaScript Dart Dash Google EcmaScript Apple-IOS Native-vs-Browser

shared by Gary Edwards on 14 Sep 11 - No Cached
  • Details on Dart on the Goto conference site were brief and Google has not officially said anything. Goto called Dart: "A new programming language for structured web programming." According to the email, though, Dash has been designed to hit three objectives: improved performance, developer usability and what Google is calling the "ability to be tooled".
  • Translated that last bit means an ability to be used with tools for coding activities such as refactoring used in large-scale programming projects.
  • Driving Dash/Dart is Google's fear of Apple and the rise of the closed web and what that could mean to Google as a programming platform for accessing the web. Google is apparently concerned innovation is moving off the web as we and Tim Berners-Lee know it, and on to the popular but fenced-off iPhone and iPad. That poses a huge problem for Google when you've built a search and ads empire on a web without fences.
  • ...3 more annotations...
  • The web has succeeded historically to some extent in spite of the web platform, based primarily on the strength of its reach. The emergence of compelling alternative platforms like iOS has meant that the web platform must compete on its merits, not just its reach. Javascript as it exists today will likely not be a viable solution long-term. Something must change.
  • The language has been designed to be consumed in the browser VM, on the front-end server and different compilers
  • Google has folded the team behind its JSPrime successor to GWT into the effort building the new language, while Joy will be built in to provide templating and model-view controller (MVC) features for code development.
Gary Edwards

Modernizr: HTML5 and CSS3 detection | Ajaxian » - 0 views

ajaxian.com/...rnizr-html5-and-css3-detection

JavaScript HTML5 CSS3 HTML Modernizr JS-Libs

shared by Gary Edwards on 02 Jul 09 - Cached
  • Gary Edwards on 02 Jul 09
     
    Modernizr is a new library that detects various HTML5 and CSS3 features and lets you know so you can use them: Enables the writing of conditional CSS and conditional JavaScript! The JS tools just keep coming.
Gary Edwards

The top 20 HTML5 sites of 2012 | Feature | .net magazine - 0 views

www.netmagazine.com/...top-20-html5-sites-2012

HTML5 Oli-Studhlme NetMagazine

shared by Gary Edwards on 19 Dec 12 - No Cached
  • Gary Edwards on 19 Dec 12
     
    Excellent review of great HTML5 Web Sites.  Includes quick reviews of tools and developer services for HTML5, CSS3, Canvas/SVG, and JavaScript.  (No JSON :()  Includes sites offering tutorials and demonstrations of how advanced, even spectacular, HTML5 builds.  This is clearly the kind of resource anyone involved with advancing HTML5 would like to return to and reference as the Web pushes forward.  Good Stuff Oli!!!! "2012 in review: HTML5 Doctor Oli Studholme nominates the websites that made best use of HTML5 this year, including a range of useful developer tools and online resources Another year has flown by, bringing the requisite slew of major changes. HTML5 is on track to be a recommendation in 2014, with W3C appointing four new editors to manage the W3C's HTML5 spec and putting the HTML5 spec on GitHub; and WHATWG focusing on the HTML Living Standard. Responsive design and Twitter Bootstrap went mainstream, IE10 was released (along with seven versions of Chrome and Firefox), and browser support continues to improve. It's impossible to pick only 20 ground-breaking sites from the thousands that did truly advance our collective game, but here's my attempt. For convenience, I've grouped them according to the way in which they use HTML5."
Gary Edwards

The Man Who Makes the Future: Wired Icon Marc Andreessen | Epicenter | Wired.com - 1 views

www.wired.com/...1

Marc-Andreessen

shared by Gary Edwards on 28 Apr 12 - No Cached
  • Gary Edwards on 28 Apr 12
     
    Must read interview. Marc Andreessen explains his five big ideas, taking us from the beginning of the Web, into the Cloud and beyond. Great stuff! ... (1) 1992 - Everyone Will Have the Web ... (2) 1995 - The Browser will the Operating System ... (3) 1999 - Web business will live in the Cloud ... (4) 2004 - Everything will be Social ... (5) 2009 - Software will Eat the World excerpt: Technology is like water; it wants to find its level. So if you hook up your computer to a billion other computers, it just makes sense that a tremendous share of the resources you want to use-not only text or media but processing power too-will be located remotely. People tend to think of the web as a way to get information or perhaps as a place to carry out ecommerce. But really, the web is about accessing applications. Think of each website as an application, and every single click, every single interaction with that site, is an opportunity to be on the very latest version of that application. Once you start thinking in terms of networks, it just doesn't make much sense to prefer local apps, with downloadable, installable code that needs to be constantly updated.

    "We could have built a social element into Mosaic. But back then the Internet was all about anonymity."
    Anderson: Assuming you have enough bandwidth.

    Andreessen: That's the very big if in this equation. If you have infinite network bandwidth, if you have an infinitely fast network, then this is what the technology wants. But we're not yet in a world of infinite speed, so that's why we have mobile apps and PC and Mac software on laptops and phones. That's why there are still Xbox games on discs. That's why everything isn't in the cloud. But eventually the technology wants it all to be up there.

    Anderson: Back in 1995, Netscape began pursuing this vision by enabling the browser to do more.

    Andreessen: We knew that you would need some pro
Paul Merrell

Firefox 3.5 benchmarked: Twice as fast as Firefox 3 - Crave at CNET UK - 0 views

crave.cnet.co.uk/...0,39029471,49302846,00.htm

firefox 3.5 javascript benchmarks

shared by Paul Merrell on 02 Jul 09 - Cached
  • So it makes sense that Firefox 3.5 called its rendering engine TraceMonkey, and with it has made the browser more than twice as fast as Firefox 3, by our own measurements. Using the SunSpider Javascript benchmark tool on a Windows PC, Firefox 3.5 scored 1,426ms, which is significantly faster than Firefox 3 which scored 3,250ms. Safari 4 and Chrome 2 scored 910ms and 709ms respectively. The average user will not find the previous version slow, and so may not notice version 3.5 working much harder. But it is, and pages are loading closer to the speed of Chrome now.
Paul Merrell

Google barks back at Microsoft over Chrome Frame security - 0 views

www.computerworld.com/...oft_over_Chrome_Frame_security

Google Microsoft Chrome Frame

shared by Paul Merrell on 26 Sep 09 - Cached
  • Although both IE7 and IE8 include a "sandbox" defense dubbed "Protected Mode," the feature works only when the browsers are run in Vista (IE7 and IE8) or Windows 7 (IE8). Google's Chrome Frame, however, prevents malicious code from escaping the browser -- and worming its way into, say, the operating system -- on Windows XP as well.
  • Yesterday, Microsoft warned users that they would double their security problems by using Chrome Frame, the plug-in that provides better JavaScript performance and adds support for HTML 5 to Microsoft's browser.
  • Chrome Frame lets IE utilize the Chrome browser's WebKit rendering engine, as well as its high-performance V8 JavaScript engine. The extra speed and HTML 5 support are necessary, said Google earlier this week, if IE users are to run advanced Web applications such as Google Wave, a collaboration and communications tool that Google launched in May.Google pitched the plug-in as a way to instantly improve the performance of the notoriously slow IE, and as a way for Web developers to support standards IE can't handle, including HTML 5. The Chrome Frame plug-in works with IE6, IE7 and IE8 on Windows XP and Windows Vista
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