Ian Bicking: the old part of his blog

What I've Been Up To

I'm off for a bit of vacation, but before then I thought I'd throw up a bunch of links to stuff I've been doing in the last couple months:

HTML

I've been doing a lot with HTML lately. HTML is great, because it's important. (Hmm... this statement sounds kind of weird. Because HTML is important, if you don't understand why it is great you need to think harder. Now the statement sounds weird, but in a deep way)

Open Plans

Stuff from work (which is a little vague, because work, private projects, HTML, OLPC, all overlap a lot).

OLPC

Stuff from One Laptop Per Child (besides the HTML experiments)...

Miscellaneous

Hmm... more stuff than I thought. Working at The Open Planning Project is great, because I spend all my time working on open source projects in public repositories. And also working on Stuff That Interests Me. If you've gotten an email from me recently, you may notice I link to our careers page in my sig, simply because I think everyone cool should work at TOPP. We're doing other interesting things too that I'm not directly involved with; I'll try to write about other people's projects before too long.

After vacation I should probably start looking more into getting WordPress on our site. TOPP is not technically tribalist! We do accept PHP, even if we don't really trust PHP. Once that's up, I'll move my own blog from this crappy piece of spam ridden crap (that I wrote, so no one but myself to blame), and then maybe I'll post more because I'll be less embarrassed about the software.

Created 07 Jun
Modified 08 Jun

Comments:

html5lib is cool too as an HTML parser, and important as a reference implementation, but I'll mostly be waiting for that work to filter back into something like libxml2.

I should stress html5lib is not a reference implementation in the traditional sense of the word; it's the first public implementation of the HTML 5 spec and has a pretty valuable set of tests but it has no other status at all; any disagreements with the spec are bugs in html5lib. In particular testing implementations against html5lib output is not recommended.

There is also some work going on on making a fast implementation of the HTML5 spec parsing algorithm in C; I will be first in line to make Python bindings when that work is complete (and no doubt others will come up with other bindings too).

# jgraham

"I went to Boston for OLPC, and we talked a lot about Web-Based Annotation"

On the subject of annotation I imagine you have seen marginalia (http://www.geof.net/code/annotation) which uses an Atom based format? I (re)used this when building 'annotater': http://p.knowledgeforge.net/shakespeare/svn/annotater/trunk/, a simple wsgi application for doing annotation (btw I did try using your Commentary app first but could never get to quite work -- plus I wanted to use marginalia as it worked cross-browser). You can see the result in action as part of Open Shakespeare at: http://demo.openshakespeare.org/view?name=phoenix_and_the_turtle_gut&format=annotate

# Rufus Pollock