Simon Willison’s Weblog

The Verbosity of Echo

Sam Ruby has called for people to start experimenting with the current (very early) Echo example feeds, and the response has been pretty impressive; check out these feeds from Joel Spolsky, Phil Ringnalda and Mark Pilgrim. Now that Echo has progressed to a stage where there are concrete feeds to examine, I have some serious concerns over the verbosity of the format. As they stand, Echo feeds contain a lot of duplicated information. Considering that the default behaviour of aggregators is to poll a feed for updates once an hour, any unnecessary information in the feed itself is going to have a very real monetary cost in terms of burnt bandwidth.

Knowledge Representation Timeline

This is pretty impressive: A Timeline of knowledge-representation that starts at the dawn of the Universe and continues through the whole of human history right up to the present day.

CSS Roundup

• SitePoint are running a CSS Design Contest, inspired by the Zen Garden.
• CSS/Exp is Mark Schenk’s collection of CSS experiments which show off some pretty advanced CSS, much of which oonly works in Opera due to its full support of generated content.
• CSS Destroy is a similar collection, with an emphasis on pushing CSS to its limits and beyond.

More unobtrusive DHTML

I’ve talked about unobtrusive DHTML before, and here’s a superb example of it in practise from Chris Casciano. His zeitgeist is enhanced by some clever javascript which hides and reveals tables of data when certain page elements are clicked. View source, and you’ll see that the document contains only structural HTML, with no embedded javascript at all. The special behaviour is added by an external Javascript file which adds the necessary event handlers when it loads, based on the structure of the existing document. This approach maintains the usability of the information in a non-javascript supporting environment, while seriously enhancing the maintainaility of the page as new structural elements can be added to the HTML which will pick up the special behaviour without any further modification to the javascript needed.

Norwegian Hixie

Congratulations Hixie on his new job at Opera software, in sunny Norway. That’s a pretty exciting opportunity. Does this mean he’ll be contributing less to the Mozilla project? (Dave Hyatt has managed to keep working on it despite his move to Apple).