January 2003

There’s been a lot of excitement lately about different ways to get one web page to talk to another. To the uninitiated, this probably sounds incredibly weird, but it’s also a very powerful concept. This is accomplished using techniques with mysterious names like xmlrpc and REST. Unless you are an über-geek, the difference between the two doesn’t matter: suffice it to say, there are some pretty well-understood and standard ways of doing this. Sometimes a non-geek like me gets an idea for a way that xmlrpc (or REST, whatever) might be used, but I don’t have the technical chops to write the code. Now, this may be my naïveté (two umlauts and an accent in one post — that’s a record for me) speaking, but I suspect that it would be possible to write a generic universal xmlrpc processor that a non-geek could configure to send out/suck in data to suit. Perhaps even give it a pretty web interface for configuring. This would be pretty cool.

I’ve been teaching myself CSS, and have figured out how to do some pretty slick things with it. It’s very powerful. I can imagine ways to make it moreso, although this would probably drive the wonks at the W3C nuts.

A way for styles to alternate. The obvious use for this would be for alternating color bands in tables, but as long as its kept general, it could be used in all kinds of different ways. The syntax could get kind of hairy: I would propose defining each alternant as a separate style, and then gang them together under the catch-all style that will be alternated something like this:

.lightgrey {background-color: #CCC;}

.white {background-color: #FFF;}

tr:alternating {styles:.lightgrey .white;}

That would give you a table with alternating rows of light grey and white backgrounds. You might want to do it with three different backgrounds, or where you only alternated every second or third column. Simple — express it like this:

tr:alternating {styles:.lightgrey .lightgrey .white .white .yellow .yellow;}

Later:It seems they’re working on this for CSS3 the Nth child pseudo-selector

I’ve also been working with some very redundant CSS stylesheets, where there are many similar styles, the only difference being the style name and one number that could be generated algorithmically. If we could use mathematic expressions in the CSS, it would save a lot of redundancy and debugging. I imagine it might be possible to use Javascript or PHP to do this for me (if I were any good at coding either one), but the idea of rolling mathematical expressions into CSS strikes me as appealing.

[Later] How’d that get there? Right when I hit the “post” button for this entry, I noticed that the “URLs to ping” field in Movable Type contained “http://blog.mediacooperative.com/mt-tb.cgi/1293”. I tracked down mediacooperative.com, and it seems to be associated with Ben Hammersly, linked to at the top of the post in reference to getting web pages to talk to each other. I guess this is auto-trackback in action, somehow.

Some mad scientist has ported Phoenix to OS X. It’s still somewhat primitive, but it’s interesting to see. Funny that I ran across this news on the same day I read that Opera may be withdrawing from the Mac. No great loss there. At any rate, that leaves us with, what, four Mozilla-based browsers for OS X (Chimera, Mozilla, Netscape, Phoenix), Omniweb, Internet Explorer, iCab, Safari. Am I missing any?

Locust World has developed the software and hardware to create mesh networks on the cheap (about $400 per box). This is potentially big. A mesh network allows one to extend a wireless network indefinitely — a signal will hop from one box to the next, until eventually finding one that’s got a landline connection. Obviously traffic could get backed up, but this makes all kinds of interesting things possible. via BoingBoing.

Sometimes a bit of software just blows your mind iCommune is one. A seemingly mild-mannered plug-in for Apple’s iTunes music software, it turns iTunes into a streaming peer (that also, incidentally, allows you to copy MP3 files).

The weak spot is that the user must manually enter fellow peers to stream from/to: there’s no auto-discovery. But once they’re in there, your friends’ music is just as available to you as the music on your hard drive, through the same interface. The simplicity is very powerful. This may be part of the reason Apple forced the author to pull the plug-in. But if you can find a copy, check it out.

And let me know what your IP number is so we can share.

There’s a post at kottke.org, taking Apple to task for not integrating more specialized interfaces into its new browser Safari.

This got me to thinking. A few years ago, Netscape was predicting that the browser would become the OS. After all, you could run a Java app inside the browser and do almost anything, right?

Obviously it didn’t turn out that way. But more interestingly, things have gone the other way. Rather than one web browser that does everything, I have multiple different web apps. I’m writing this post in a specialized blogging program called Kung Log. It does one thing: post to Movable Type blogs. I read a lot of blogs in NetNewsWire Lite. Although I don’t use it much, I’ve got Sherlock for specific kinds of searches, and it has an excellent competitor, Watson I can read the funny papers in Comictastic. And I’m sure there are lots of other specialized clients out there for extracting and presenting a specific data type from the web.

And of course, I’ve got, what, four general-purpose web browsers on my hard drive.

The profusion of specialized tools makes sense in a broader picture. Each tool can focus on being good at one thing. With the availability of a reasonably fast and always-on Internet connection, the Internet becomes almost like a feature of the computer–like the CD drive or the mouse. Nobody says “if you’ve got one program that interacts with the CD drive, why would you need two?” Also, although this isn’t as polished as it could be, different applications can interact with each other so that separateness doesn’t necessarily need to get in the way of integration. And increasingly, that integration is actually between applications on different computers, communicating over the Internet. Pretty nifty.