Monday, 23rd June 2003
PEAR Tutorials
PHP Kitchen have compiled a list of PEAR tutorials, covering a number of useful PEAR modules. This is an especially important resource considering that PEAR’s module documentation is probably the weakest part of the project. Most modules have some documentation available in the PEAR Manual but much of this is incomplete and crucially there are no links from the package directory entries to the documentation for each package. It’s a shame because PEAR has a great deal of excellent code that many developers are completely unaware of.
XML Shorthand Language
Via Keith, PXSL, the Parsimonious XML Shorthand Language provides a shorthand way of writing and maintaining XML documents. It’s based around the idea that a lot of XML formats contain more markup than actual text, thus by reversing the way the syntax is formatted and using meaningful indentation to express hierarchies markup heavy XML can be greatly simplified.
Sporting Gentleman’s Guide
If you’re still wondering what RDF is actually for, Ben Hammersley’s Sporting Gentleman’s Guide to the Semantic Web includes a perfect example of triples (even if it get’s a bit less obvious after that).
Another rant about Flash
Michael Pick has kicked off an interesting discussion on the usefulness of Flash, which is continued on mezzoblue. The key idea under discussion is that while Flash has its uses it remains a fundamentally bad choice for serving up text based content. I couldn’t agree more. It’s nice to see that some Flash designers think the same way.
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