afongen

If I seem rather quiet here over the next week or two, it’s because I’m crazy busy preparing to move, and writing a new set of web accessibility guidelines for work (modelled on the excellent State of Illinois Web Accessibility Standards). Mostly done with the latter, a ways to go for the former. Please forgive my silence.

Minnesotans have a rather irritating tendency to pride themselves on being able to tolerate all sorts of winter weather. (I must admit at the outset that I’ve lived in Minnesota all my life and am hardly an exception.) We delight in warning newcomers of the harsh winters they will face, secretly hoping that if they can’t handle the winters then maybe they’ll leave. We grumble the first few snowfalls of the season, faced with people who suddenly can’t remember how to drive. We mock those poor souls in warmer climes — you know, the ones who normally have to deal with things like hurricanes — who run for cover when the temperature dips below 40 (Fahrenheit) or a half-inch of snow falls. “You call that cold? Try 30 below!” (That’s -34.4 for you sensible folks who think in Celsius).

This excessive pride is usually accompanied by an equally irritating tendency to complain about the weather. Yes, we pride ourselves on the weather we face, but we’re not happy about it. If it’s sunny too long, we gripe about our lawns not getting the water they need. If it snows, we bitch about having to shovel. If it rains, we can’t wait for the sun. (By no means do I think that any of this is unique to Minnesotans. I’m just saying.)

I long ago tired of this meterological machismo and have tried to excise it from my behavior. I decided a few years back that things would be a whole lot easier and I’d be a more pleasant human being if I just plain liked weather. Doesn’t matter whether it rains or shines, sleets or snows, I like it. I don’t grit my teeth and bear it, I don’t sneer disdainfully at those who can’t handle it, I just like it. Or at least I try. Weather is a delightful reminder that I am alive in the world.

Nevertheless, I have to admit that I’ve felt somewhat cheated by the mild winter we’ve been having. It just doesn’t seem right when it’s hovering around 10F/-12C there’s no snow on the ground. It goes against a lifetime of expectations. So boy oh boy, am I glad to see that we’re finally getting some snow. Snow!

Nanoweb: a web server written in PHP. Why? This is my favorite part: “I found the idea of using a language mostly aimed at web scripting to write a web server was quite funny.”

All of a sudden I need to know a whole lot about LDAP. I wasn’t too impressed by what I was finding on the Web so was all prepared to buy a book. Not a big deal, really, since I dedicate a certain amount of income to technical books anyway. But then I remembered: I have a Safari subscription! And the book I wanted, Understanding and Deploying LDAP Directory Services, is available through Safari. Perfect. I may eventually buy the book, but here’s a great way to familiarize myself with LDAP fast.

I’m quite impressed with Safari. It’s the most sound idea for publishing electronic books that I’ve seen.

I reported back in January that scientists had identified the color of the cosmos. Turns out that the One True Color is actually more of a beige. No wonder setting my desktop to that greenish thing didn’t give me superpowers.

A list of user agent strings on allnetdevices.com. And Microsoft has a Mobile Developer site, including an article on “Designing Web Sites for the Internet Explorer for Pocket PC.” I thought I’d mentioned that here, but it looks like I forgot.

While thinking about a redesign for this site, I’ve also been wrestling with the content management/updating side of things.

On the one hand, as Paul Sowden has pointed out about his own site, the site content is updated much less frequently than it’s accessed, so static files make a whole lot of sense. I’d like a system in which each entry can stand alone as an XHTML file, be served up and make sense. Archive groupings can be built from these individual files.

On the other hand, I’m generally not comfortable with systems like GreyMatter and Movable Type, which edit static files but generally require those files to be world-writable. There are ways around that, of course, but I am still drawn by the notion of using an RDMBS instead.

If I store entries in a database, though, I want to be able to pull them out to static X(HT)ML files without a lot of hassle. As I’ve indicated before, I very much believe that for long-term flexibility, XML is the way to store content. It doesn’t matter much to me whether the XML docs are stored on the filesystem or in a database somewhere. I’ll likely end up writing my own rather basic system that stores individual entries as XHTML documents in an RDBMS. It’s probably not necessary to roll my own, but I feel like it. Good for the soul and all that. As usual, it’s just a matter of finding the time.

Then there’s the matter of different page elements like navigation menus, the news feed, lists of links, and so on. I use a template system right now so that I don’t need to update every page whenever I change or remove one of those sections. The most recent version of each page element is served up every time a page is requested. Each of those sections is actually an XML file that’s parsed and converted to XHTML on the fly. Honestly, I’d like to do this with JavaScript instead of PHP/Perl but am concerned about accessibility: do I really want to prevent non-JavaScript-enabled user agents from access to that information? On the other hand, is it really essential content or is it just something extra that’s available if you happen to have JavaScript? That’s a coward’s way out, though, using an argument more suited to effects like rollovers or hierarchical menus than actual content. The response is the same: I will use JavaScript to add those sections to the page but offer an alternative method to access the content, probably on a separate page.

First, though, I’ve got to push out a new design. Back with that soon.

A coworker casually mentioned this article on ZDNet citing a .NET Developer Platform architect from Microsoft who suggested that we look for a replacement for HTTP for web services. I thought it interesting, but nothing terribly new, since yeah HTTP is kinda pushed to the limits with some of the things coming down the pipe. It seemed to be more an article intended for upper management’s consumption rather than serious techies’. Before too long, though, I saw a number of irritated comments out there (scottandrew, oreillynet, PHP Everywhere…).

I don’t understand this. Am I missing something in the tone of the article? Or are people just reacting to the fact that it’s someone from Microsoft who’s suggesting another protocol? I thought that debates about the the suitability of HTTP for web services have been going on for a while now. I recall Simon St. Laurent mentioning this almost two years ago. It’s discussed in both O’Reilly’s XML-RPC book and their SOAP book, which mention other protocols like BXXP, apparently now called BEEP. We have Jabber-RPC, in which XML-RPC messages are being carried over Jabber (not that anyone ever seriously expected that to replace HTTP, it’s just damn cool).

So why the uproar? We should think about these things now so we can lay down a decent infrastructure, one that’s robust and secure.

Of course, I write this at the same time that I’m designing web services to run over HTTP, probably on port 80. Heh. Nothing that exposes large interfaces to massive, mission-critical systems, though.

Alex Russell has some worthwhile things to say on the matter, as usual.

Last night I dreamed that Pat Robertson had declared computers to be satanic because he’d read a mistranslated manual that referred to a “dumb-ass terminal” instead of a “dumb terminal.” I was laughing so hard in my sleep that I woke up Kiara, who woke me up to see what was so funny.

What I would likely be doing today if I were not hauling out boxes and boxes of our belongings, preparing to move: playing with DBD::SQLite. In planning a redesign, I’ve been thinking of different ways that I could store page elements. An RDBMS is one of them, and while I like MySQL, I am intrigued by SQLite.

But that must wait for another, chillier day. The weather’s gorgeous today, so I’m heading out.