Solipsism Gradient

Posted by Guest:
internal tags don’t need the prefix, they need the namespace.

By setting the default namespace locally on the xhtml:body (or xhtml:div if we all change to that), then no extra characters are required.

See my http://www.intertwingly.net/blog/index.rss2 for an example.

The poor brain boggles. Let’s see if I can make sense of this…

First Don Box switches his RSS feed to support <content:encoded> (which is what I did from early on, BTW). Then Sam Ruby gently chides him for that, proposing the use of <xhtml:body> instead, a form which I hadn’t read about previously.

Then, Don immediately agrees and posts examples – curiously enough, they mess up his <content:encoded> RSS feed to illegibility (at least in NetNewsWire). Looking at the source, I see nested <content:encoded>s and CDATAs, and many unescaped tag delimiters; all this may possibly be syntactically valid, but it’s extremely confusing; I tried to hand-parse it and didn’t go very far. FWIW NetNewsWire seems to agree with me … my own feed never nests these things. Don promised to fix this by Monday.

Comments at Sam Ruby’s post soon discuss details and a few samples appear. Sam himself updates his own feed to <xhtml:body>, saying it’s “more bandwidth friendly” than <content:encoded>, which probably won’t be true if all internal tags must also contain the xhtml: prefix, as some argue.

Meanwhile, Jorgen Thelin asks for more stability, arguing that such fast changes in the interpretation of RSS makes compliance impossible. The comments to that by Sam and Don are very thought-provoking, and I’ll read them again carefully tomorrow, before I make any changes to my feed.

Sjoerd Visscher, in the meantime, proposes using <xhtml:div> instead of <xhtml:body>; Don disagrees, saying this would not convey the meaning that this tag brackets the real content. Sam arguments that the purpose of the whole exercise is avoid making the structure of the comment opaque; he also changes his own feed to the new scheme. NetNewsWire apparently doesn’t understand it, and falls back to using the <description>.

It’ll be interesting to see what newsreader authors say about this. Greg Reinacker says he’s already made the necessary changes in NewsGator. Purely from a newsreader’s perspective, I’m not sure if Sam’s comments about opaqueness apply; newsreader software always has to try to show something, even if the feed is malformed. I suppose NetNewsWire, for instance, whenever it sees a <content:encoded> tag it just shoves the contents into the lower-right pane, trusting the built-in HTML parser to do the right thing. And once Brent switches over to Apple’s upcoming WebCore, he’ll have even less to worry about. Meanwhile, I’m not sure supporting xhtml: prefixes in NetNewsWire will be trivial; he’ll probably have to prescan and take them out…

On the other hand, I agree that making the contents more structured may help Feedster and similar efforts.

Regarding the <xhtml:div> vs. <xhtml:body> question, my (probably naïve) first reaction is that <xhtml:div> will make things easier for browser-based aggregators, as the contents will be easily insertable into another page; whereas <xhtml:body> tags will have to be removed or converted, and also must contain block elements… isn’t it easier to treat the contents as a div and add an implicit body around it whenever necessary? For my weblog at least, a post is never displayed separately on a page, so my feed reflects exactly my top page, as a list of over a dozen posts. Perhaps both options should be allowed?

I’m looking forward to learning more about XML, XHTML and RSS from this discussion. Thanks, everybody!

For several reasons I decided to rename this weblog “Solipsism Gradient”. Blame it on having reread all of Iain M. Banks‘s Culture novels in a row…

…on the practical side, it’s shorter and easier to remember than “Stochastic Aleatory Ontological Expostulations”, or whatever it was before. At least for me. 😛

Now, can someone explain to me why weblogs are traditionally named like rock bands? (Or Culture starships, for that matter?)

As the subject says , now and then I’ll post interesting links and/or talk about random subjects here. More structured topics will be added.

Currently, nobody else is allowed to post comments here – at least until I figure out a way of initially hiding these comments from others. Stay tuned…

x AKA M. wrote:

I had missed the point being to communicate with spiders. It became more clear due to Kevins patient explanation at Joi Ito’s blog in this thread. I thought it was so people could vote on links, not spiders.

Yes, Kevin’s explanations are great. However, just for whoever else’s reading this, I’d like to make clear that people (or at least whoever puts the links on the site) do vote on the links, but it’s the spiders (not other people) who count the votes.

I had not thought about, spiders, bots, and engines out there secretly logging your activities and words and generating Whuffie points. Cool thought.

Exactly, having an attribute would make all that much easier; see how TechnoRati and Google have to jump through hoops to do their rankings, and still they have no clue whether my links are meant to be positive or negative. Also, votes will not depend on anything whatsoever being installed on the site being voted on, which is extremely important.

Posted by x AKA M.:
I had missed the point being to communicate with spiders. It became more clear due to Kevins patient explanation at Joi Ito’s blog in this thread. I thought it was so people could vote on links, not spiders. My bad. It does bring up a thought closer to the heart of the Whuffie concept: Automated Whuffie. Though Doctorow’s book is not that clear on how one’s Whuffie is built, (or torn down for that matter), thus far the discussions I have had (OK I admit they are with myself most of the time) have pointed to merit being added by people. I had not thought about, spiders, bots, and engines out there secretly logging your activities and words and generating Whuffie points. Cool thought.

Ciao

M. (or is it X?) at Whuffie comments:

Kevin Marks and Rainer Brokerhoff blogs are ‘abuzz with talk of adding a value system to your html links. That way when you create a link you can assign a value to it to show how much you “approve” or “disapprove” of what you are linking to. While this seems to create a quick and easy Whuffie like system, it is not at all comprehensive, and I have to question if it would really be worth the trouble. Why not just put a header above the link: “I hate this blog, I don’t trust them, they suck, but check them out to mock their very existance” Same effect, no?

I don’t think this is the same effect at all. The proposed link value system is to have a simple way to tell spiders (and similar robots) that scan the HTML for links whether you approve or disapprove of that link. Of course, as Kevin points out, one often will complement this by user-visible styling (or even a header).

While it of course is a “Whuffie”-like system, the effects are not exactly the same – since valued links will usually point at individual posts or news items, the resulting values will not necessarily apply to the whole site. They may not even apply to the item’s author. I agree that it isn’t comprehensive – by design. Rating systems that are installed on a particular site solve other problems entirely, but I’d like a way to say to search engines “here’s a link to this item, but I disagree with it; don’t tally my link on the same list with people who agreed with it”.

Tim Appnel responded at length to my post about weblogs and bulletin boards:

Rainer Brockheimer recently made a post on recent developments to utilize TrackBack and other related technologies. I’m in general agreement with Rainer and Tom Coates, whose writings he also cites in his post.

Thanks for the reply, Tim. And I’ve got one more item for my lengthy list of mispellings of “Brockerhoff” .

The following quote I believe requires some clarification on my part being a proponent of this cause:
Rainer Brockerhoff wrote:

…the whole trackbacks are comments movement is an attempt to make weblogs more like bulletin-boards.

I can say this is not my primary motivation nor do I believe it is for others involved in this discussion though certainly these notations descend from its lineage. Furthermore, I don’t see these efforts as a desire to claim a territory unexplored when its patently not. To me this work is only an evolution or a reformulation of past.

It’s often hard to tell about things like motivation from outside. I’m certainly happy to learn that you favor the evolutionary approach, and I agree a 100% with that.

First, I think it worth noting again and in more direct terms that the history of bulletin boards are not lost on me in the least. I have not specifically mention it and perhaps I should have. (I suppose I’m changing that right now.) The fact of the matter is that my experiences with bulletin boards drive my interest in TrackBack, weblogs and the convergence of these related technologies.

Offering a historical perspective on things is always welcome. I have many younger friends who have a weblog and are often surprised to hear about parallel developments in ancient history (meaning, for them, pre-1999). When I started an ISP back in 1993 the most important service we offered was bulletin board software (in our case, FirstClass) to use for support and community-building.

My personal opinion is that bulletin boards (as Mark Pilgrim would put it) suck. They are generally an unfocused collection of threads that, until RSS becomes commonplace, require me to come to it and use its interface to comment. The threaded display makes it even harder for me to grok particularly when it’s a highly active conversation.

I agree with you here, but this is usually just a consequence of the lack of restraint from the boards’ administrators, than simply the software’s fault. The software I use here (phpBB) has great configuration and modification capabilities, but it also has more features enabled by default than the average administrator can cope with. Avatars, ratings, on-line messaging, e-mail, indiscriminate topic starting, and so forth. Just look at the phpBB Support Forum: there are over 44000 topics! This is unbrowseable, and even searching is hard to do.

On the other hand, I found that adding weblog features to phpBB is possible and unwanted features can be turned off, while keeping the really useful stuff. So I have very few topics – which I regard analogous to Movable Type‘s categories. Only I can generate new topics, and inside a topic posts, comments and trackbacks are handled equally. I’m working on an option to display just one thread inside a topic, and with that I think my implementation will be quite useable.

Weblog comments only slightly improve on this by organizing the conversation to a single thread and quite often (and thankfully in my opinion) display them in a flat rolling manner. These discussions are also started by one or a select few individuals that typically increase their quality. While many are beginning to take advantage of the RSS generation functionality found in weblogs tools, weblog comments still require that I use their interface. Furthermore those comments are limited to that one weblog unless I cut, paste and post them elsewhere.

The standard MT implementation is, for me, quite unwieldy. From the main page, one often must click on a link to see the full post. To read and post comments, a second link must be clicked, and to read and post trackbacks, a third one. So, my point regarding your trackbacks are comments thread is that this makes weblog posts as readable as bulletin board topics: the original post and all pertaining comments are on the same page. By the way, one important note on usability (which can be applied to both weblogs and bulletin boards) is Joel Spolksy‘s article Building Communities with Software. I disagree with some of his points – for instance, I favor quoting and previewing, while he’s against it – but it’s a great article.

A key differentiator is that TrackBack-enabled comments have a standardized remote API. It’s my belief that this capability could give rise to tools that allow prolific power commentators to work from one interface. They also allow for me to comment from a post to my weblog. It’s also noteworthy that the distributed loosely coupled nature of TrackBack-enabled comments (quite a mouthful) can be organized and grouped by the individual. (This of course assumes that individual is so inclined. I would because I think some of my best thoughts are not on my weblog.) Bulletin boards and weblog comments alone are constrained to a specific site and grouped by a certain topic or theme.

This is a very important point. phpBB has a somewhat complex posting procedure, which I’ve simplified to implement trackback. But it’s reasonably RESTful, which is positive. I won’t go into the REST vs. XML-RPC discussion here, though. But posting comments to someone else’s weblog usually throws me into a different interface, as you say. Not to speak of the various ways of writing links, styling text, seeing a preview (or not).

I see some hope in the convergence of tools like, for instance, NetNewsWire and Feedster. Hopefully in the future we’ll be able to post an article on a weblog/bulletin board, and the next day see aggregated responses to it in a single window, write a comment or rebuttal right there, preview how it will appear, and have it redistributed (as posts, comments, trackbacks or whatever is appropriate in each case) to the interested parties. It would effectively be a distributed bulletin board architecture, among other things. I’d be very interested in discussing how this might be done…