Mokka mit Schlag » Software Development

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Despite some warts, XML and the Web have done pretty well. They work and they work well. A large part of that is because both were designed with certain basic principles in mind. This gives them a unifying vision and a clean architecture that solves many problems.

However, when a technology becomes successful it often attracts developers who recognize its success but don’t recognize or understand the underlying reasons for its success. Each one wants to make a change here, an addition there, a deletion somewhere else. Sometimes these suggestions are good and valid. Sometimes they’re not. However, even the suggestions that address real needs and use cases cause problems if they’re made without a deep understanding of the principles of the thing being changed. It’s like modifying a building by knocking down walls, cutting new windows, and erecting an extra bedroom on the roof. If you do this without consulting the original blueprints and understanding of the architectural principles that went into the house design, the best you can hope for is an ugly mess. More likely the whole structure will collapse around you, as the changes weaken the foundation the whole edifice rests upon.

Previous examples include cookies, frames, SOAP, YAML, SimpleXML, binary XML, RSS, and many other cases I could mention. However the latest is coming from a place I really didn’t expect it: the W3C XForms and XHTML working groups. These two are working together to eviscerate XML namespaces, and make it difficult to impossible to process XHTML2 and XForms with standard XML tools like XSLT and DOM.
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I’ve been eagerly testing the various betas of Firefox 2.0 to see if it fixes some of my personal pet peeves. So far it looks like I’m going to have to start voting for or opening new bugs on these subjects:
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I’ve managed to get the full text feeds going again. However the paragraph breaks and some other markup is getting lost. More work is needed. I’ve also managed to put one Google ad back on the site without obviously breaking Safari like the old ads did. Still, for the time being most longer articles can be more easily read in a browser on the site than in your feed reader.

Update: The full text feeds should now be fully functional with all markup intact. Holler if you notice any problems. I still need to check the category specific feeds and the comment feeds.

John Cowan suggested I should be using Atom 1.0 on this site, and Adam Constabaris told me I could do it with a plug-in, even if WordPress is severely lagging on Atom 1.0 support. I’ve now installed the plug-in which is going to change all my feeds to Atom 1.0. There are no more RSS or Atom 0.3 feeds. The old URLs all still work–cool URLs don’t change, of course–but they now serve Atom 1.0 insead of 0.3 or RSS.
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I’ve implemented a significantly revised theme here on Mokka mit Schlag. The main change was switching to a Holy Grail style of positioning. This works much better on Safari, and somewhat better on Firefox. However the big change was removing the Google adds from the sidebar. They likely will return at some point. However, the revelation that finally enabled me to fix the Safari problems was that it was precisely the AdSense iframe that was getting in my way.
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