Microformats and Language Drift

I was sitting at the bar with Chaals and Danny Ayers (who I’d previously only known through mutual friends and by reputation) at the Fairmont Springs at lunch. He’s an RDF guy, and I put to him the question I’d put to Harry Halpin last night (while watching Super Troopers); Harry likes the loose structure of microformats (though he acknowledges the utility of established ontolologies for constrained domains like medicine and physics), and I wondered if maybe the linguistic model of exemplars would be useful in RDF and OWL to add some flexibility.

But if formal ontologies are too rigid, I think microformats is too loose. It’s great that people are tagging their content, and useful things can be done with these tags in the short term. But microformats is not immune to language drift. Someone will see a tag, misgrok the meaning from context, and idiosyncratically misapply it to other content. This is exacerbated by the international and multi-language nature of the Web.

For example, let’s say that someone had tagged some content with the word “meme” 15 years ago; it would clearly have referred to Dawkin’s model of “idea evolution” (where a concept is spread not through accuracy, but through adaption to its mental environment… an idea akin to Colbert’s “truthiness”). But a few years ago, it spread into common use as a synonym for “fad”; so far, it retains some superficial similarity to Dawkin’s idea. In a few more years, it will probably be a very dated word (like “groovy”) and may well shift to a meaning like “old-fashioned”; it would then have completely lost its essential meaning. So, a diagram of Dawkin’s model tagged “meme” would then be misinterpreted, misindexed, and regarded with confusion by a future reader.

In the long haul, RDF provides a more time-proof solution by providing conceptual context, not just a cluster of words.

W3C 2.0

I’m here in Banff, Canada for the 2007 W3C AC (Advisory Council) meeting. The AC is essentially the company reps to the W3C. I played a small part in one of the panel discussions yesterday.

It was the last presentation of the 2-day conference, and the theme was Web2.0: what it is, and how the W3C is adapting to and enabling it. I gave an overview of what Web2.0ey things WAF and WebAPI WGs are doing. It went well… I made a short SVG slideshow with some geeky in-jokes, and it got some laughs. It may have been slightly overshadowed, however, by the conversation between 2 of the other panelists: Sir Tim Berners-Lee (the creator of the Web) and Tim O’Reilly (a prominent tech publisher who coined the term Web2.0). Tough act to follow.

The conference was a lot of fun, as usual, and I got to meet and talk with a lot of technical luminaries, including Dave Raggett, who’s generously letting Chaals and I crash in his hotel room.

Backpacker’s in Banff

I’m writing in the lobby of a backpacker’s lodge (youth hostel) in Banff, Alberta. The Rockies loom all around the town, and I can see a snow-capped peak out the window. I flew into Calgary (airport code YYC, for some odd reason) and rented a car; the drive here was gorgeous. As I got into town, I saw a fleamarket/auction, and stopped in for the local flavor; I picked up a couple Sarah McLachlan CDs for a loony (1 Canadian dollar) on a lark.

It’s been a while since I stayed in a dorm-style hostel (replete with creaky bunk beds and slightly questionable bathrooms)… not since my days hitchhiking through Europe, if I recall correctly. The place is bustling with young-uns. Naturally, several of them are Australian (the kudzu of travelers), and most of the rest seem to be French-Canadian (though we’re a long way from Quebec). I think most of the residents are here for hiking, snowboarding, and skiing in the mountains. I plan on doing some hiking while I’m here, too, but I’m reluctant to do anything more X-treme, lest I need an X-ray afterward.

And it ends like this:

Kurt Vonnegut’s humorous humanism had a profound effect on me in my teens. Cat’s Cradle and Wampeteers, Foma, & Granfaloons, in particular, shaped my view of the world. I think I may have read everything that’s he’s published in book form, all but his most recent book of essays. Years later, a Ben Folds Five song, Alice Childress, struck the same chord that Vonnegut played in me: “…the world is full of ugly things that you can’t change. Pretend it’s not that way… that’s my idea of faith. You can blow it off, and say there’s good in nearly everyone; just give them all a chance.” It’s that message that raises hope in me, that informs my take on how to get through life: people are basically good. We don’t need someone looking over us, we can look out for ourselves and help each other along. He told me how you don’t need to believe in God to try to be a good person, an idea which isn’t very fashionable right now.

In high school, my circle of friends read (and frankly idolized) Vonnegut and Richard Brautigan. Brautigan, the off-Beat poet, had that same deceptively simple profundity that mattered more than what was contained in the words. Later, several of us fell deep into the twisty big world of Robert Anton Wilson, who had the same sort of message, but delivered it in a much bigger package, wrapped in layer after layer of paper. The world is complex: be simple.

Brautigan talked about the beauty of life and relationships in his books of prose and poetry. He took his own life, alone, in 1984, the same year Vonnegut tried to do the same. The same year I was getting acquainted with both, though I didn’t know that then. So it goes.

Wilson died earlier this year. He liked life, and helped me like life. Before he died, his fans sent him donations to cover his medical debts; he asked them to buy his books instead. So it goes.

Vonnegut spent his life in a cynical, hopeful string of books. He talked about morality and mortality and how we shouldn’t treat other people. He fell down, and damaged his brain. He died yesterday. So it goes.

He’s in heaven now.

God bless you, Mr. Vonnegut.

SD West

I’ve been out here in Santa Clara, CA, the last couple of days at SD West, a developer conference. There have been a few good classes (I finally met the hyperproductive Elliotte Rusty Harold for the first time), and a couple of great events. David Platt gave a hilarious and insightful talk based on his book, Why Software Sucks, and Google dominated at the geek-themed quiz show, Developer Bowl. 6th Sense was a finalist for the Jolt Awards, which were announced here last night, and I stood in for our marketing guy, since I was going to be here anyway. We didn’t take away the grand prize for our category, but we were one of the runners-up; we got a nice little plexiglass plaque.

I’ll be holding my own class on SVG tomorrow afternoon. I don’t know how well attended it will be… the last day of conferences tends to have a lot of attrition. But it will be fun anyway, and I always enjoy evangelizing SVG. I whipped up a little presentation app in SVG… it uses the powerpoint idiom, but slides around a large canvas between text and interactive examples. I’ve been using SVG slides for a while, but this is a little more interesting… well, interesting to make, I hope it’s interesting to watch. The class will center on workflow using SVG, and I’ll dig into code here and there (this is for developers, after all).

Update:  I’ve put my SVG slideshow up here.

Dining Down Under

I’m no gourmet… in fact, I’m somewhat of an anti-foodie. Dining at expensive restaurants and dedicating one’s self to culinary arts seems like a waste of money and time, respectively. I like good-tasting food, sure, but I don’t think it’s very important. Maybe that’s why I have such an easy time being a vegetarian; it’s just not worth the ethical cost for me to eat meat (also, meat’s kinda gross… I helped butcher my fair share of pigs and deer and, yes, squirrels when I was growing up; I have literally made sausage).

But the very fact that I’m a strict lacto-ovo vegetarian (I eat milk products and eggs) means that I focus on food more than I would otherwise, if only in what I avoid. Is that irony? I guess my exception to this is that while I have a very high tolerance for repetitive meals, I do enjoy novelty in my diet. So, dining in Australia was great for that.

Sometimes when I travel, I find it a little challenging to find food. (My friend Cameron, also a vegetarian, has a pretty sensible policy on this… he suspends his vegetarianism while visiting other countries, in large part to sample the local color; it’s too bad I’m so dang stubborn.) But Australia, for all its meaty reputation, is actually pretty veg-friendly. For one, it has some great Thai restaurants, like the one I mentioned earlier. For another, it has pies.

Yummy, yummy pies…

Now that I think of it, M and I had pies there last year, but we just sorta stumbled on the pie stand. This time, I was with locals, and I was made aware that this was a quintessentially Australian dish. You can get them all over the place. We don’t really have them here in the States… the closest thing we have is what we call “pot pies”, and they’re usually frozen, not something you get in a restaurant. They have whole restaurants that serve nothing else! These aren’t your typical 8-inch fruit pies, but little 5-inch savory pies… and they make veggie pies (also spinach “pasties”). I had these pies for breakfast, and they really hit the spot.

After arching… archerying… shooting arrows, Andrew and I went to another Aussie standby, the sidewalk cafe restaurant/bookstore, where I got (what else?) a gourmet pie. But this one wasn’t as filling as I needed after a bit of a workout, so I ordered a second dish, this one off the kids’ menu. When the waitress served it to me, I kinda hoped she’d say, “Do you come from the land down under?” But she just smiled, and gave me… a vegemite sandwich.

It had butter on it, and was much better for it. Andrew said that’s the only way to eat vegemite. I agree.

Arch-Friend

My host, Andrew, was around today, and he suggested we engage in one of his weekend hobbies: archery. I’ve always wanted to try archery, and had even signed up for a class in high school (but unfortunately never got the chance… the thuggish coach explained that there wasn’t enough equipment, so the girls would learn archery while the boys “got” to play football; do I sound bitter? I hope so). So we drove to Olympic Park, where the 2000 Olympics took place; the archery range was the site of the Olympic archery competition.

It was a lot of fun: I paid $20 Australian for an hour-and-a-half session, with a droll lesson included, as well as periodic tips throughout. I used a recurved bow with a 20-lb pull; Andrew had his own snazzy collapsible 40-lb bow. We shot around 10 “ends” (rounds of volleys, with six arrows to an end) at a target 20 meters away, and Andrew assured me that I did adequately. My top score was 41, out of a possible 60 (that’s around 68%… a high “D”. Me fail archery? That’s unpossible!). I missed the target completely on a few arrows, but got at least one bullseye (10 points) and several gold-ring shots (9 points). For the last 4 ends, they attached balloons to the bullseye, and while I missed it the first end, I popped it the last 3 rounds. I was pretty happy about that. My technique definitely got better as we progressed, but my arms and fingers got more sore. It’s a surprising amount of work to hold the bowstring back while you’re aiming, compounded (pun partially intended) by the trembling as my strength sapped away, making aiming even harder. I’m not an athletic guy, but if I went again, I think I could make a decent showing when I was fresh.

I think I got a bit of a traveller’s cold, so we laid low the rest of the day back at his place, doing a bit of work, and then walked to his favorite local Thai place for dinner… amusingly enough, called Sawasdee, the name of my favorite Thai place in Raleigh. I had a delicious green curry noodle tofu dish, with just the right amount of spice to leave me glowing and alleviate the cold symptoms.

Opera (Not the Browser)

I worked all morning on until mid afternoon, but I felt a bit silly sitting in front of a computer all day while Sydney was just a short train ride away. I’d flown all this way, and it seemed a shame to waste the chance to do some Australizing. The same urge made me take a dip in the ocean at lunch on Thursday. The water was nice and warm, and the waves at Manly Beach made for a pretty vigorous splashing around. But today I felt a little less ambitious, so I went down to Circular Quay, walked around the harbor, and saw the exhibits at the Museum of Contemporary Art (which M and I had enjoyed last year). Then I walked around the Opera House into the park area. After a while, I began to recognize some landmarks from last year. Once again, I was stunned by the giant bats that hung like strange fruit from the trees. After walking around for an hour or so, I stumbled onto a grassy area we hadn’t seen… there was a large pond with little islands, and birds all around. I relaxed and read for a while. Towards dusk, the cockatoos got really active, and were screaming and swooping low over the heads of people lounging on the green, and I took a bunch of pictures of them. It’s so odd to see them common in the wild, a sort of context shift from them being relatively rare pets.

When the park was closing down, I strolled back past the Opera House, and the courtyard was fenced off, with a huge crowd on the stairs. I went by the ticket booth to see what was going on, with the idle thought that I might get a ticket (though I was sure the prices would be too rich for my blood). I was a little relieved when the cashier told me it was sold out. But as I passed by the front gate, I heard a loudspeaker announce that they would be letting people into the courtyard to watch that night’s opera, La Traviata, on the giant plasma screen… which is what all the people outside had gathered to see… and, I gathered, paid to do so. So I figured, what the heck, and loitered a few minutes. Sure enough, they opened the gates to rabble of my ilk, and I lay down 20 feet from the screen to watch the concurrent performance.

I have to admit that I’m not an opera fan, but it was worth it for the novelty of seeing an opera at the Sydney Opera House (even if I wasn’t inside). I wasn’t really taken with it… some of the music was nice, but that style of overblown range-roving singing gets on my nerves. Of course, the plot was inane and nonsensical, and (spoiler) the heroine died “tragically” at the end. I think I’ll stick with musicals for my infrequent music-story-mashup fix.

I kept missing M throughout the day… she would have enjoyed it, but with me in a conference the whole week, it didn’t make any sense to bring her along this time.

Time-Travelogue

Though it’s Friday back home, it’s Saturday here in Sydney, and it’s been a a long week of meetings. Or meeting, I should say… the first SVG WG F2F of 2007, and my reunion of sorts. I first joined the SVG WG last January, and my first meeting was in Sydney. The winter (read: summer) Sydney meeting, hosted by Canon, has become a tradition. I sure can’t complain. As usual for a face-to-face, we’ve been sequestered in a hotel room all day, though with a beautiful view of Manly Beach right out the sliding doors. At night, we go out for dinner, then back to work, and to sleep. Read on for a day-to-day account of my trip thus far…

Continue reading “Time-Travelogue” →

Boston in Winter

I’m here in Boston at a WebAPI Working Group meeting, along with several other WGs. I arrived yesterday afternoon, and headed toward my hotel on the rattletrap subway (part of the “T”… the nation’s oldest mass transportation system, and looks every day of it). The closest stop was across the river from the hotel, so I walked the Boston University Bridge across the Charles River… the river was frozen over, and geese were gathered on the ice. I was pleasantly surprised that it has not been that cold, though when the wind blows it is numbing.

We’re gathered at MIT, in the Stata Center, a misbegotten piece of architecture that looks like it’s a Transformer caught midway between building and airplane forms. I’d hoped to attend the WAF meeting here as well, earlier in the week, but there was just too much to do at work. As it was, I wasn’t quite done with my project (adding annotation functionality to some pregenerated charts), and the short plane rides just weren’t enough time to finish it (I stayed up late last night to dot the i’s and turn it in). I just barely got to my hotel before it was time for me to rush to MIT for the reception. I find that these joint gatherings are really useful… you get to network with others in the W3C, find out what else is going on outside your own corner of the Web, and find opportunities for collaborative efforts that bind the standards world together. Several old friends and acquaintances are here, including Chaals, Anne, and Kjetil from Opera (first time I met Kjetil IRL), Nandini from Sun (the co-chair of the SVG WG), Arun from AOL, and Jim from just about everywhere… as well as lots of other smart people I don’t know quite as well. I also exchanged a few words with Sir Tim Berners-Lee, the energetic creator of the World Wide Web, who I’d met once before in Mandelieu, France.

WebAPI is concerned with the programming interfaces (events and methods) that script programmers use in Web development, while WAF is sort of a grab-bag of different higher-level programming languages and formats. In WebAPI, we reviewed the current state of our specification deliverables, and took steps to move a couple of them forward. One of those steps was a silly debate about what the names for some methods would be (some favored shorter names that are easier to type, while I was in the camp that preferred more descriptive albeit longer names… the decision came down on the latter, but I suspect the debate isn’t over). Another spec was waiting on a module to handle keyboard events –an issue with a lot of gotchas and thorny legacy problems, the different kinds of keyboards ranging from non-English keyboards to mobile phone soft keys– and I reluctantly volunteered to split that module off into its own spec, so we could move DOM3 Events forward. I don’t relish working on this spec, since it will involve aligning with a dilapidated patchwork of old interfaces that I personally feel should be discarded in favor of moving forward with a more sensible solution, but legacy content does need to be supported when possible. We also held liaisons with other groups, including SVG, which handed off some bits of its spec in order to concentrate on graphics, and which needs those bits to move forward apace. I was pleased to see Microsoft in attendance in the person of Travis, our newest WG member, and to have the participation of the likes of Marcos (hyperproductive WAF member).

I’ll be here the next couple of days, and hope to see some local friends while I’m here.