snowdeal.org

“This page is intended to serve as a public forum for exploring and extending my in-situ WYSIWYG web editor, written in JavaScript for the Internet Explorer 5 browser and DOM. An earlier version was featured in this article by BYTE columnist & web-groupware guru Jon Udell. (Thanks Jon!)

Here you’ll find the latest incarnation of the editor script and the JS bookmarklets to enable anyone using IE 5 to outfit their browser for instant, as-you-surf, rich content editing of any HTML document on the Web. The editor is embedded in this page, so you can Try It Now! – go ahead, give it a spin! – but only if you’re viewing the page with IE 5. Apologies to Netscape users; as NS 6 oozes its way into beta, I’m hoping to create a Mozilla & W3C-friendly cross-browser version.”

“A Magic Problem Solver is technology that non-technologists believe can dissolve stubborn problems on contact. Just sprinkle a little Java or ODBC or clustering onto your product or service, and, voila , problems evaporate. The downside to Magic Problem Solvers is that they never work as advertised. In fact, the unrealistic expectations created by asserting that a technology is a Magic Problem Solver may
damage its real technological value: Java, for example, has succeeded far beyond any realistic expectations, but it hasn’t succeeded beyond the unrealistic expectations it spurred early on.”

“XML makes it even more imperative than ever that an enterprise understand and resolve the different words and meanings that it uses to refer to things important to it. To illustrate, people may variously be called customers or clients or debtors – all terms used to refer to people or organizations that buy from the enterprise. These different terms indicate semantic differences. An organization must know the different meanings of its data (as meta data) that are used throughout the business. It must then
define standard terminology – and establish agreed meaning – as integrated meta data to be used by the enterprise. Only then can these terminology differences be resolved so that semantic integrity is maintained.”

“We may rehearse this fundamental axiom of descriptive markup in terms of a classical SGML polemic: the doubly-delimited information objects in an SGML/XML document are described by markup in a meaningful, self-documenting way through the use of names which are carefully selected by domain experts for element type names, attribute names, and attribute values. This is true of XML in 1998, was true of SGML in 1986, and was true of Brian Reid’s Scribe system in 1976. However, of itself, descriptive markup proves to be of limited relevance as a mechanism to enable information interchange at the level of the machine.

As enchanting as it is to contemplate the apparent ‘semantic’ clarity, flexibility, and extensibility of XML vis-à-vis HTML (e.g., how wonderfully perspicuous XML <bookTitle> seems when compared to HTML <i>), we must reckon with the cold fact that XML does not of itself enable blind interchange or information reuse. XML may help humans predict what information might lie “between the tags” in the case of <trunk> </trunk>, but XML can only help. For an XML processor, <trunk> and <i> and <booktitle> are all equally (and totally) meaningless. Yes, meaningless.

Just like its parent metalanguage (SGML), XML has no formal mechanism to support the declaration of semantic integrity constraints, and XML processors have no means of validating object semantics even if these are declared informally in an XML DTD. XML processors will have no inherent understanding of document object semantics because XML (meta-)markup languages have no predefined application-level processing semantics. XML thus formally governs syntax only – not semantics.”

“In any case, regular folks must be able to create their own content and contribute it to the Internet. This sounds easy enough, but is actually quite a challenge. The biggest problem is that most people are (and always have been) bad content creators. That’s why we have professional writers, graphic designers, filmmakers, speakers, musicians, and other types of media professionals. When an average person tries to create content, they typically don’t have much to say and what they do say is often said badly.

The vast wasteland of Geocities confirms this. Giving users a home-page editing program does not turn them into good writers.”

“How can we increase the number of people who contribute content to the Web? I see a few promising approaches.”

“Weblogs are of so highly varying quality that I don’t consider them a true solution to the problem. Somebody who is a good writer and has something to communicate will make a good weblog, for sure (see, for example, my current favorite: Doc Searls). But the average weblog is unreadable.

However, I agree with Evan that there are aspects of the weblog format that lend themselves to improved content:

• The basic idea is that you write a short observation or note whenever it occurs to you: this is surely less intimidating than having to write an entire article.
• You can get away with the short notes even for substantial issues because of the weblogs’ reliance on links to other sites as the way to present the full story.
• Even if your own writing is not that great, you will still provide a valuable service if you can identify sources of other good content on the Web and link to it. Thus, weblogs are a form of selection-based content creation: you have the entire Web to choose from and you get to post a few links every day. The best current example is Tomalak’s Realm: he usually doesn’t write anything, so the editorial selection of links and quotes is the only service provided by the site and that is enough to make it the second-most useful site on the Web today (after Google).”

“…Well, you know,
we all want to change the world.” The Beatles defiantly made this statement on their enormously popular White Album in the late 60’s.
Some 30-odd years later, this tune has been running through our minds, in seemingly never-ending techno-ambient fashion, as the Internet industry routinely uses the “R” word in trade press and business plans.
We are deluged with “revolutionary technologies,” “revolutionary new business models,” and “revolutionary revolutions” to the point that the word doesn’t carry any clout anymore
(other examples of formerly reserved words diluted by marketing hyperbole include “visionary,” “pioneer,” and “guru”).
Over the past year, we have been hearing much ado from the various factions and fighting from the front lines of the Blogging
Revolution. This Web trend certainly has the earmarks of an uprising, as well as its
fair share of passion from all sides, but is that enough to categorize it with other great revolutions throughout history?
Since the craze began, commentary on weblogs has run from the astute to the absurd. Since we are all slaves to Internet time,
we decided to throw our own hat into the ring by providing metacommentary on the craze, while the latest rash of historical retrospectives are still fresh in our RAM.”

“The fact is – with very few exceptions – e-business never packs the
impact of the independent content producer. These are the people who
are pushing the boundaries, harnessing the power of the web, and
building the things people want and need.

No one throws large amounts of money at them, and the stock market
doesn’t rise and fall on their pronouncement, but they are the heft,
the substance, and the texture of the web.

They are what makes the web go. That hasn’t changed.

Like the individuals they are, their contributions are varied: some
catalog the strings of the web, while others spin breathtaking tales.
People are building communities and raising awareness. They share their
tools, their ideas, their passions, and their dreams.

These are the people who make a difference.

I want you to make a difference.”