Friday, 8th November 2002
Web services in action
All Consuming is another one of those information-about-weblogs sites, but with a heavy emphasis on books:
[... 252 words]URLs matter
Jeremy Zawodny talks about URLs, and describes a recent internal Yahoo discussion over how the URLs for their stock tickers should work. His points in favour of short, simple URLs are particularly worth noting:
[... 121 words]Content to code ratio
Adrian Holovaty has been investigating the content-to-code ratio of various news sites compared to various blogs. Unsurprisingly the blogs win hands down due to the tendancy to use CSS to separate structure from presentation. Adrian has put together a PHP script to calculate the ratio which can be accessed online or downloaded for personal use. Incidentally, from the comments in the code I learnt that PHP’s strip_tags() function neglects to strip the --> at the end of an HTML comment.
Object persistence
Simon Brunning talks about persistence, and how much more complicated it is now that objects are involved. The best explanation I’ve seen of how objects and relational databases can be used together was in Martin Fowler’s Patterns of Enterprise Application Architecture, but now that the book has been published he has removed the online version. IBM’s DeveloperWorks has a new article up describing persistence management in Python, which talks in details about Python’s native serialization method (pickling) but only mentions ZODB in passing. I agree with Simon—object databases just don’t seem as elegant a solution as RDBMSs. Object databases may provide persistence but they don’t seem nearly as powerful as relational databases when it comes to flexibility of accessing data.
Clean URLs
Handy bookmark for bloggers who wish to validate: cleanURL. It gives you the URL of the current page with all &s replaced with &, ready to be posted in to a blog entry. Unescaped ampersands are one of the most common causes of invalidity on my blog so this is going to come in very handy.