Semantics

Bb's Semantic Feed: RDF: A Major Site Redesign

Shelley — 2009-06-21T19:51:07+00:00

I've finished the re-organization of my web site, though I have odds and ends to finish up. I still have two major changes featuring SVG and RDFa that I need to incorporate, but the structure and web site designs are finished.

Thanks to Drupal's non-aggressive use of .htaccess, I've been able to create a top-level Drupal installation to act as "feeder" to all of the sub-sites. I tried this once before with Wordpress, but the .htaccess entries necessary for that CMS made it impossible to have the sub-sites, much less static pages in sub-directories.

Rather than use Planet or Venus software to aggregate feed entries for all of my sites, I'm manually creating an excerpt describing a new entry, and posting it at Burningbird, with a link back to the full article. I also keep a listing of the last few months stories for each sub-site in the sidebar, in addition to random display of images.

There is no longer any commenting directly on a story. One of the drawbacks with XHTML and an unforgiving browser such as Firefox, is that a small error is enough to render the page useless. I incorporate Drupal modules to protect comments, but I also allow people to enter in some markup. This combination handles most of the accidentally bad markup, but not all. And it doesn't protect against those determined to inject invalid markup. The only way to eliminate all problems is not allow any markup, which I find to be too restrictive.

Comments are, however, supported at the Burningbird main site. To allow for discussion on a story, I've embedded a link in every story that leads back to the topmost Burningbird entry, where people can comment. Now, in those infrequent times when a comment causes a problem with a page, the story is still accessible. And there is a single Comment RSS feed that now encompasses all site comments.

The approach may not be ideal, but commentary is now splintered across weblog, twitter, and what not anyway—what's another link among friends?

I call my web site design "Silhouette" and will release it as a Drupal theme as soon as it's fully tested. It's a very simple two column design, with sidebar column either to the right (standard) or easily adjusted to fall to the right. It's an accessible design, with only the top navigation bar coming between the top of the page and the first story. It is valid markup, as is, with the XHTML+RDFa Doctype, because I've embedded RDFa into the design. It is not valid, however, when you also add SVG silhouettes, as I do with all but the top most site.

The design is also valid XHTML 5.0, except for a hard coded meta element that was added to Drupal because of security issues. I don't serve the pages up as HTML 5, though, because the RDFa Doctype triggers certain behaviors in RDFa tools. I'm also not using any of the new HTML 5 structural elements.

The site design is plain, but it suits me and that's what matters. The content is legible and easy to locate, and navigate, and that's my second criteria. I will be adding some accessibility improvements in the next few months, but they won't impact on the overall design.

What differs between all of the sites is the header graphic, and the SVG silhouettes, which I changed to suit the topic or mood of the site. The silhouettes were a lot of fun, but they aren't essential, and you won't be able to see them if you use a browser that doesn't support SVG inline. Which means you IE users will need to use another browser to see the images.

I also incorporate some new CSS features, including some subtle use of text-shadows with headers (to add richness to the stark use of black text on pastel graphics) and background-color: rgba functionality for semi-transparent backgrounds. The effects are not viewable by browsers that don't yet support these newer CSS styles, but loss of functionality does not impact access to the material.

Now, for some implementation basics:

*I manually reviewed all my old stories (from the last 8 years), and added 410 status codes for those I decided to permanently remove.
For the older stories I kept, I fixed up the markup and links, and added them as new Drupal entries in the appropriate sub-site. I changed the dates to match the older entries, and then added a redirect between the old URL and the new.
By using one design for all of the sites, when I make a change for one, it's a snap to make the change for all. The only thing that differs is the inline SVG in the page.tpl.php page, and the background.png image used for the header bar.
I use the same set of Drupal modules at all sub-sites, which again makes it very easy to make updates. I can update all of my 7 Drupal sites (including my restricted access book site), with a new Drupal release in less than ten minutes.
I use the Drupal Aggregator module to aggregate site entries in the Burningbird sidebar.
I manually created menu entries for the sub-site major topic entries in Burningbird. I also created views to display terms and stories by vocabulary, which I use in all of my sub-sites.
The site design incorporates a footer that expands the Primary navigation menu to show the secondary topic entries. I've also added back in a monthly archive, as well as recent writings links, to enable easier access of site contents.

The expanded primary menu footer was simple, using Drupal's API:

<?php
$tree = menu_tree_all_data('primary-links');
print menu_tree_output($tree);
?>

To implement the "Comment on this story" link for each story, I installed the Content Construction Kit (CCK), with the additional link module, and expanded the story content type to add the new "comment on this story" field. When I add the entry, I type in the URL for the comment post at Burningbird, which automatically gets linked in with the text "Comment on this story" as the title.

I manually manage the link from the Burningbird site to the sub-site writing, both because the text and circumstance of the link differs, and the CCK field isn't included as part of the feed. I may play around with automating this process, but I don't plan on writing entries so frequently that I find this workflow to be a burden.

The images were tricky. I have implemented both the piclens and mediaRSS Drupal Modules, and if you access any of my image galleries with an application such as Cooliris, you'll get that wonderful image management capability. (I wish more people would use this functionality for their image libraries.)

I also display sub-site specific random images within the sub-site sidebars, but I wanted the additional capability to display random images from across all of the sites in the topmost Burningbird sidebar.

To get this cross-site functionality, I installed Gallery2 at http://burningbird.net/gallery2, and synced it with the images from all of my sub-sites. I then installed the Gallery2 Drupal module at Burningbird (which you can view directly) and used Gallery2 plug-ins to provide random images within the Drupal sidebar blocks.

Drupal prevented direct access from Gallery2 to the image directories, but it was a simple matter to just copy the images and do a bulk upload. When I add a new image, I'll just pull the image directly from the Drupal Gallery page using Gallery2's image extraction functionality. Again, I don't add so many images that I find this workflow to be onerous, but if others have implemented a different approach, I'd enjoy hearing of alternatives.

One problem that arose is that none of the Gallery2 themes is XHTML compliant because of HTML entity use. All I can say is: folks, please stop using  . Use   instead, if you're really, really generating XHTML, not just HTML pretending to be XHTML.

To fix the non-compliant XHTML problem, I copied a version of my site to a separate theme, and just removed the PHP that serves the page up as XHTML for XHTML-capable browsers from this "Silhouette for HTML" theme. The Gallery2 Drupal modules allow you to specify a different theme for the Gallery2 pages, and I use the new HTMLated theme for the Gallery2 pages. I use my XHTML compliant theme for the rest of the site. Over time, I can probably add conditional tests to my main theme to test for the presence of Gallery blocks, but what I have is simple and works for now.

Lastly, I redirected the old Planet/Venus based feed locations to the Burningbird feed. You can still access full feeds from all of my sub-sites, and get full entries for all but the larger stories and books, but the entries at Burningbird will be excerpts, except for Burningbird-only posts. Speaking of which, all of my smaller status updates, and general chit-chat will be made directly at Burningbird—I'm leaving the sub-sites for longer, more in-depth, and "stand alone" writings.

As I mentioned earlier, I still have some work with SVG and RDFa to finish before I'm completely done with the redesign. I also have some additional tweaks to make with the existing infrastructure. For instance, I have custom 404, 403, and 410 error pages, but Drupal overrides the 403 and 404 pages. You can redirect the error handling to specific pages, but not to static pages, only to pages within the Drupal system. However, I'm not too worried about this issue, as I'm finding that there's typically a Drupal module for any problem, just waiting to be discovered.

I know I must come across as a Drupal fangirl in this writing, but after using the application for over a year, and especially after this site redesign, I have found that no other piece of software matches my needs so well as Drupal. It's not perfect software—there is no such thing as perfect software—but it works for me.

* This process convinced me to switch fully from using Firefox to using Safari. It was so much more simple to fix pages with XHTML errors using Safari than with Firefox's overly aggressive XHTML error handling.

Bb's Semantic Feed: RDF: The "WhatWG's Mine is Mine" Design Principle kerfuffle

Shelley — 2009-06-01T20:42:01+00:00

I'm not part of the HTML WG, but still follow along. Enough to see that one of the big ongoing debates lately is about the HTML WG's Design Principles draft document. There are too many threads to link, but I would suggest the following as good places to start:

Bb's Semantic Feed: RDF: A Loose Set of Notes on RDFa, XHTML, and HTML5

Shelley — 2009-05-23T16:32:58+00:00

There's been a great deal of discussion about RDFa, HTML5, and microdata the last few days, on email lists and elsewhere. I wanted to write down notes of the discussions here, for future reference. Those working issues with RDFa in Drupal 7 should pay particular attention, but the material is relevant to anyone incorporating RDFa.

Shane McCarron released a proposal for RDFa in HTML4, which is based on creating a DTD that extends support for RDFa in HTML4. He does address some issues related to the differences in how certain data is handled in HTML4 and XHTML, but for the most part, his document refers processing issues to the original RDFaSyntax document.

Philip Taylor responded with some questions, specifically about how xml:lang is handled by HTML5 parsers, as compared to XML parsers. His second concern was how to handle XMLLiteral in HTML5, because the assumption is that RDFa extractors in JavaScript would be getting their data from the DOM, not processing the characters in the page.

"If the object of a triple would be an XMLLiteral, and the input to the processor is not well-formed [XML]" - I don't understand what that means in an HTML context. Is it meant to mean something like "the bytes in the HTML file that correspond to the contents of the relevant element could be parsed as well-formed XML (modulo various namespace declaration issues)"? If so, that seems impossible to implement. The input to the RDFa processor will most likely be a DOM, possibly manipulated by the DOM APIs rather than coming straight from an HTML parser, so it may never have had a byte representation at all.

There's a lively little sub-thread related to this one issue, but the one response I'll focus on is Shane, who replied, RDFa does not pre-suppose a processing model in which there is a DOM. The issue of xml:lang is also still under discussion, but I want to move on to new issues.

While the discussion related to Shane's document was ongoing, Philip released his own first look at RDFa in HTML5. Concern was immediately expressed about Philip's copying of some of Shane's material, in order to create a new processing rule section. The concern wasn't because of any issue to do with copyright, but the problems that can occur when you have two sets of processing rules for the same data and the same underlying data model. No matter how careful you are, at some point the two are likely to diverge, and the underlying data model corrupted.

Rather than spend time on Philip's specification directly at this time, I want to focus, instead, on a note he attached to the email entry providing the link to the spec proposal. In it he wrote:

There are several unresolved design issues (e.g. handling of case-sensitivity, use of xmlns:* vs other mechanisms that cause fewer problems, etc) - I haven't intended to make any decisions on such issues, I've just attempted to define the behaviour with sufficient detail that it should make those issues visible.

Bb's Semantic Feed: Big Sw little sw: Under Construction

Shelley — 2009-05-20T20:12:53+00:00

I couldn't resist the title. Just be glad I refrained from using one of the old animated "Under Construction" GIFs.

Since I'm no longer on the hook for anything related to HTML5 and RDFa, I can return to my books. Books, plural, as I hope to be starting a new book within the "traditional" publishing track, soon.

I doubt I'll have much to say over the next few months. Just a heads up that the site may look odd or not work at times, as I try out some new stuff. No worries, it hasn't been taken over by aliens.

Bb's Semantic Feed: RDF: Wolfram Alpha: What is RDF?

Shelley — 2009-05-16T19:10:30+00:00

I asked Wolfram Alpha: what is RDF?

I would have been more impressed by Wolfram Alpha if at the end of its interpretation of my request, it asked me, "Was this answer correct? Was this answer complete? If not correct or complete, what do you consider RDF to be?"

I then asked the same question of Google.

Bb's Semantic Feed: Big Sw little sw: When Social Media Closes Door

Shelley — 2009-05-16T12:48:40+00:00

I have work to do, trying to pull a lot of pieces together into some semblance of a balanced and comprehensive document on HTML5, RDFa, Microdata, et al, but first, I need decompression time from an excess of social media this last week. I don't know how all of you can manage the various weblog/mailing list/IRC/Twitter et al lives. I personally feel as if my brain has been ripped out through my eyeballs by sadistic chipmunks.

I have been waiting to see if other metadata use cases would be discussed in the WhatWG mailing list before writing any more reviews, points, or counter-points. Since the HTML5 editor, Ian Hickson, seems to have moved on to new things, I think we can assume whatever remaining use cases will either get folded into some other effort, or will be just forgotten.

In addition, I've also been playing with the new HTML5 Microdata proposal, too, though the underlying processing rules for generating RDF triples has been changing. Again, though, since Ian has moved on to adding vCard, and vEvent, and various other "microdata formats" to the HTML5 spec, we can assume that the RDF aspect of the document is stable. For the moment.

In the meantime, Google has rolled out use of RDFa, and though this act does not make the earth quake, it does make things in the semantic metadata world more interesting. Yes, even if Google used its own vocabulary. The Google announcement was followed soon after by a new document by Shane McCarron of the RDFa-in-XHTML working group, that provides an approach to using RDFa and HTML4 together.

There was a flurry of noise about the Google announcement everywhere, which was to be expected. Shane's proposal also came under review, though without the Google numbers. There was some discussion on the HTML WG mailing list, the RDFa Public mailing list, and the RDFa-in-XHTML mailing list on the new proposal, but none on the WhatWG mailing list. However, a new objection arose to RDFa and RDF in general arose on the WhatWG list: link rot and its impact on RDFa, which also spread to the RDFa-in-XHTML list.

Now, I'll be frank in that this one just didn't hit me as a critical concern. Even after the discussion on the WhatWG mailing list, I still think that concerns about link rot are a weak objection to RDF/RDFa. After all, isn't RDF older than some of the WhatWG members? Regardless, it's been around long enough to know that if we were going to have problems with link rot, they would have surfaced and hit us in the face by now. But any weakness, perceived or otherwise, seems to generate a great deal of animated discussion in the WhatWG group mailing list.

There's also a new twist on this discussion, for me at least, in that I also read the archives for the WhatWG IRC, as the discussion was taking place. You can sometimes get a lot more insight into the collective mind of the WhatWG group reading the IRC archives than you can the mailing list. My concern was that this new objection to RDFa would be pounced on by WhatWG members, and sure, enough, after both Manu Sporney and Dan Brickley provided extremely reasonable answers how link rot, if it occurred, could be fixed, the following popped up on the IRC:

Philip: gets an impression from the "Link rot is not dangerous" topic that namespace URIs are quite a fragile foundation
Philip: so they suggest building other structures on top of that, like caching and redirecting and hardcoding override lists and reminding people not to accidentally let their domains expire and making local subclasses
hsivonen: Philip: it seems to be that believing in Follow your Nose and believing in Link Rot not being dangerous are contradictory beliefs but you can pick either one and argue coherently
Philip: and I suppose it makes me wonder instead whether it'd be a good reason to not use that foundation at all
Philip: (though I don't know what other foundations would be better)

To me, the general drift of this thread leads me back to my, yes stubbornly held belief, that "RDF/RDFa does not have to justify itself". In other words, rather than question what is, or is not, in the HTML5 specification—a valid topic for the WhatWG—we get sidetracked into having to defend RDFa and, ultimately, RDF. I'm just not going to go there, because RDF is, and it ain't going away, and this is true regardless of what happens with HTML5. So why are we talking about these things in the WhatWG mailing list?

I jumped back into the WhatWG email list thread after reading the IRC thread, hoping to cut the hombres off at the pass, but it was too late: the more we defended, the more weight was given to this "new" problem with RDF (which is humorous, if you think on it, because the HTML5 Microdata proposal makes use of the same RDF URIs).

Following the mailing list entries (which I received whether I wanted to continue or not as I was now cc'd directly in all responses) in addition to the IRC entries, is like experiencing double vision, except in the one email list thread, all is sweetness and light, and the other IRC list, anything but. The problem with IRC, and the reason I detest it so much, is that people write first and possibly think about it later. There is little "uh oh, this is public" filtering going on. There's also a group-think mentality that can develop in IRC channels, especially those that attract people with very similar viewpoints. The WhatWG IRC entries demonstrate evidence of group think, in that there seems to be a shared, expressed disdain several of the WhatWG members have for many of us (generally and specifically)—which makes the later, polite chit chat particularly unwelcome.

Yes, following along with the WhatWG IRC is that much more pleasant when you suddenly find yourself the subject of current discussion, as our old friend Last Week in HTML5 has noted several times in the past, and about me yesterday. Of course, MLW's story title was also unpleasant to read: no working group for middle aged women. There was something about that title, following on the IRC comments, that left me with a feeling I'd rather go for a root canal than deal directly with with the WhatWG again.

This little saga wasn't restricted to just IRC, mailing lists, and weblogs, it's also hit Twitter, too. Did you expect otherwise? But my adventures in social media this last week didn't end there: I also attempted to attend an HTML WG meeting last Thursday using Skype and IRC, but didn't know the procedure one follows as regards to making request via IRC in order to speak during the teleconference. The technology also ended up being wonky for me and the only time I knew I was heard was when someone asked, "Who said, 'Oh, this is ridiculous'?"

Didn't matter anyway, because Ian Hickson, the sole and only HTML5 editor, does not attend the HTML WG teleconferences. I gather most of these meetings end up with the attendees playing a game of "What did Ian mean?" Evidently, from what others have said, Ian has stated that he finds these meetings to be a waste of his time. Of course, that's only hearsay. Probably from Twitter.

The experiences this week just demonstrate that all of the whizzy technology doesn't a bit of good, if you have groups of people interacting who don't respect each other. To me, it is apparent that several WhatWG members don't respect the RDFa folks, as they've continued on today, in IRC of course, dismissing Shane's hard work with barely a glance. Not all of the folks. Both Henri, and Philip are pretty good about saying whatever they say on the IRC directly to you, in comments, email or mailing list (though my impression from both is that they don't have a high opinion of RDF/RDFa, either). Others, however, are neither that direct, nor that helpful in their commentary.

I'm not going to pretend that the feeling isn't mutual. After all, I wrote the first "offending" Twitter message. And I've been critical of HTML5, and WhatWG process (and members) here and elsewhere. Frankly, I don't regret any of it, and if that puts into the category of "doesn't play well with other children", I'd rather be there than among those who are polite when communicating with you directly, and rip you a new one when your back is turned.

Luckily, I don't officially represent the RDF or RDFa communities, and I can freely express my opinions, here and elsewhere. I know that Dan and Manu and others still want to work with the WhatWG folks, and more power to them. But I've since unsubscribed from the WhatWG email list, though I hesitate to stop reading the IRC, as this is about the only place where you can really see what's happening with the HTML5 effort.

I'm also going to cut drastically back on all of this social media and do my thing in my space, because by the end of the week, all I had to show for all of the frantic activity, this networked communication with my fellow seekers of specification truth, this bright and shiny new way of togetherness, was bits of writing littered about all over the place—both by me, and about me—and a really bad mood.

Bb's Semantic Feed: Big Sw little sw: Google Searchology - Rich Snippets

Shelley — 2009-05-12T18:14:58+00:00

Google is currently having a live presentation on changes the company is making to search. The changes are quite significant, and very impressive.

The one that caught my attention, though, is rich snippets. Google will now read and incorporate two open standards, microformats and RDFa, in its search results.

So is annotating your page with microformats and RDFa worth while now? Hell, yes! Not only is Yahoo incorporating microformats and RDFa into SearchMonkey, but now, so is Google, and as part of the general Google search functionality.

Bb's Semantic Feed: RDF: RDFa in Drupal Core

Shelley — 2009-05-12T01:19:53+00:00

While I'm in the process of looking more closely at the Microdata proposal, I wanted to note that today marked the end of the first day of the code sprint for incorporating RDFa into the core of Drupal 7.

Yes, when Drupal 7 hits the streets, 1.7 million Drupal web sites, and counting, will have built-in support for RDFa.

Bb's Semantic Feed: Big Sw little sw: Use Cases and Comparison of RDFa/HTML5 Microdata

Shelley — 2009-05-12T00:58:17+00:00

I'm now a member of the HTML Working Group at the W3C, as an invited expert. I was rather surprised at how fast the membership was accepted. Surprised and faintly alarmed. I imagined existing members sitting around in the dark, rubbing their hands together and murmuring, "Ahh. Fresh meat."

I've been working with Philip in comments trying to compare RDF triples from RDFa and RDF tripes from Ian's Microdata proposal, but this type of effort deserves a more in-depth test. I still have use cases to deliver, but the ones I've uploaded to the HTML WG don't seem to be generating any discussion. Instead, I'm going to do one more document, with select use cases, hopefully ones Ian's already covered so I can compare the RDFa approach (which were typically provided with the use cases— all the use cases were provided by RDFa folks, from what I can see), and the Microdata proposal approach.

In the meantime, Ian has renamed @property to @itemprop because of the concerns we raised. This insures that there is no overlap on terminology between RDFa and Ian's Microdata proposal. There is a still a requirement, though, that the Microdata proposal be capable of generating the same RDF as RDFa, and that will be the next set of tests.

I'm open for suggestions as to the use cases to single out for testing. And I promise to be fair in my effort. After all, I'm a member of the W3C HTML WG now—I have a responsibility to be both objective and fair, in the interest of producing the best specification.

Bb's Semantic Feed: RDF: Joining the HTML5 Working Group

Shelley — 2009-05-11T19:06:53+00:00

I should be working on my book, if I don't want my pitiful little reserve to be sucked dry before I'm finished. At the same time, though, I feel engaged with the discussion about "microdata" et al in relation to the HTML5 working group. And I figure the writing I'm doing providing new use cases and examining the differences between the HTML5 editor's proposal and RDFa, can be useful to my book. There's some other stuff happening at the HTML WG related to accessibility I'm also interested in, and I'm keeping a watchful eye on SVG/HTML5.

Sam Ruby has suggested I join the HTML Working group, as an Invited Expert. It doesn't cost anything, though I am concerned about the time commitment. I'm not a joiner, per se, but I do have strong opinions about certain aspects of the specification. Now if only some big company that isn't teetering on the edge or ruin would hire me to be their standards wonk.

What? No takers? Afraid of being singed by the Bird?

Wusses.

Anyway, I'll put in my request to the HTML WG and we'll see if I'm acceptable to the powers-that-be.