Open Web

We can all learn a lot of lessons from the history of DDE/OLE/ OLE3/COM /ActiveX/DCOM /COM+ (you can start reading up on Wikipedia to get some background) and how we went from everyone using best-of-breed standalone apps to one integrated, nearly monolithic Office. It basically all started with copy and paste. People who never spent a lot of time in singletasking, character-mode operating environments like the DOS command line don't recall that simply copying-and-pasting information between apps was difficult at the time. And part of the revelation of Windows for mainstream users (or Mac, for leading-edge tech fans), was being able to easily share data in that way. This was different than what Unix users were used to with the command-line pipe, or from what most applications do with feeds today, in allowing structured information flows between applications. There's a desire to combine data from different sources in an arbitrary way, and to have the user interface display the appropriate tools for whatever context you're in. The dominant model here, probably because of the influence of the early PARC demos, is to have toolbars or UI widgets change depending on what kind of content you're manipulating. Microsoft was really into this in the early 90s with OLE2, where your Word toolbars would morph into Excel toolbars if you double-clicked on an embedded spreadsheet. It was ungainly and ugly and slow, especially if you had less than an exorbitant 8MB of RAM, but the idea was pretty cool. And it still is. People are so focused on data formats and feeds that they're ignoring consensus around UI interoperability. The Atom API and Metaweblog API give me a good-enough interface if I want to treat a discrete chunk of information (like a blog post) as an undifferentiated blob. But all the erstwhile spec work around microformats and structured blogging (I forget which one is for XML and which one's for XHTML) doesn't seem to have addressed user experience or editing behavior

OLE for the Web: oEmbed is a format for allowing an embedded representation of a URL on third party sites. The simple API allows a website to display embedded content (such as photos or videos) when a user posts a link to that resource, without having to parse the resource directly. Table Of Contents Quick Example Full Spec Security considerations Discovery More examples Authors Implementations

transclusion of hypertext documents. Transclusion is technically defined as "when you put that one thing in that other thing". In its current implementation, Twitter has declared that media which is shown within the Twitter interface comes from selected partners. But actually, the technology to allow embedding of rich media from almost any site already exists, using a system called OEmbed. Geeky stuff, but it's made by nice people who are pretty smart, and it lets any site say, "Hey, if you want to put our thing in your thing, do it like this". It works. Lots of sites do it. Nobody's getting rich off of it, but nobody's getting sued, and in between those two extremes lies most of what makes the Web great.

Paquete is a packaging plugin Paquete is a simple package viewer javascript plugin which supports packages like IMS and others where a package is a collection of related pages and content. Paquete describes the relationships within the package using a JSON manifest file. Paquete uses one page to host all of the pages of a package which reduces overall page loading time and allows users to navigate easily. Once an individual sub-page is loaded, it is cached in the host page making browsing much quicker. Specific pages are denoted individually so bookmarking of an individual page is possible. What does Paquete do? Paquete arranges files within the package so there is a table of contents (TOC) on the left-hand side and html pages for viewing, on the right. User navigation can randomly utilise the TOC or the arrowed navigation buttons direct navigation through the package page by page, in a linear fashion. How can Paquete be applied? Paquete can be applied in various ways: on its own, to group files and display them in a browser for viewing. in a Learning Management System (LMS) like Moodle, for viewing course content. in other web applications where navigating through grouped content is important.

The ultimate goals are to have a computer-viewable display format (XHTML) and at least one printable format. We may also want a post-processing editable format. Our farthest target as yet is XHTML, styled by CSS. For a printed format, one expects a complete target to be able to produce a document that has features which one would expect of any Siddur: page numbers, table of contents, footnotes, side notes, header/page title, etc. XHTML originated as a computer-display format, not a publishing format. Even when combined with CSS 2.1, it does not support some of the features above (with some hacking, side notes, a static header/footer, and page numbers are possible, but it is still missing vital features). CSS3 is more publishing friendly, when implemented, will make life much easier. Until then, we will have to be a bit more creative. The following is a list of software libraries and formats that can help us increase the range of formats that we can target. XSLT or Java are the preferred languages, since the rest of our chain is in XSLT, and driven by Saxon, which is written in Java, allowing us to bundle the entire chain in a portable program, which can be distributed ( with the added bonus of being able to be distributed within a web browser as an applet ).

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

Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco, Palace Hotel November 14th- 16th (Mon-Wed)

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An independent non-profit dedicated to the development and protection of open, non-proprietary specifications for web technologies. Aimed at building a lightweight framework to help communities deal with the legal requirements necessary to create successful and widely adopted specifications. hoping to break the trend of creating separate legal entities to support individual specifications, coming out of the realization that we could come together and generalize our efforts.

Lengthy article written by Tim Berners-Lee describes his concerns for the future of the Open Web.  Tim details the history of the Web, describing the principles that made the Web an Open Platform of universal access, exchange and collaborative computing.   excerpt: Universality Is the Foundation Several principles are key to assuring that the Web becomes ever more valuable. The primary design principle underlying the Web's usefulness and growth is universality. When you make a link, you can link to anything. That means people must be able to put anything on the Web, no matter what computer they have, software they use or human language they speak and regardless of whether they have a wired or wireless Internet connection. The Web should be usable by people with disabilities. It must work with any form of information, be it a document or a point of data, and information of any quality-from a silly tweet to a scholarly paper. And it should be accessible from any kind of hardware that can connect to the Internet: stationary or mobile, small screen or large.

Excellent product release.  MarkLogic is trying to become the Google Search, Organize and Work for all things MSOffice.  Focus on MSOffice 2007 OOXML documents.

See also Wikipedia on Linked Data: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linked_Data

Good review with some important pointers that all software developers should pay attention to.  iPAD apps are essentially WiFi Web Apps at some level.  Once again the NoteCase Pro - Google Docs issue of HTML-CSS Stylesheets vs. in-line custom formatting comes up.  Again. excerpt: InfoWorld.com investigated the available programs and put together a recommended business apps suite that should be the standard install on corporate iPads. I was surprised to find that none of the iPad productivity suites is ideal, though one comes close. (I've added U.S. iTunes links for each app covered.) Related Content View more related content Get Daily News by Email Of course, beyond the productivity apps that nearly everyone uses, iPadders have further needs, so I've also put together a collection of additional business apps that you might make available to employees or point them to for more specialized work.