whump.com | More Like This WebLog » html

CommentPress and Writing on a Roll of Towels

Bill Humphries — Thu, 26 Jul 2007 04:58:53 +0000

Back in 2004, Kathyrn Cramer, a veteran hypertexter, described blogging as “writing on a roll of papers towels” [1], so I’ve been on the lookout for blogging tools that behave more like hypertext.

The Institute for the Future of the Book released CommentPress, a WordPress Theme, that breaks out block-level elements of a blog post into linearly linked nodes. Comments are made on, and displayed with each node.

For example: McKenzie Wark’s Gamer Theory 2.0 serialized as a weblog, each chapter is a long post, broken down into a stack of nodes, with node-level comments at the side.

There’s another WordPress extension, I think it was done by someone at Yahoo!, that allowed comments at the paragraph level. Anyone remember that one?

Update: It’s Jack Slocum’s work I was thinking of. Thanks to Jeppe Kabell in the comments.

[via O'Reilly Radar]

[1] Cited previously in: From Paper Towels to Hypercard?

No, really, catalogs matter.

Bill Humphries — Thu, 18 Jan 2007 18:56:47 +0000

Back in 2004, I wrote up my harsh lesson in using a validating parser and why you should use an XML Catalog in your systems.

Last week, Netscape temporarily removed the DTD for RSS 0.91 from their site, and things promptly went south.

In response to that mess, Henri Sivonen points out that if you’re sending XML (not HTML) over the wire, there’s no reason to attach a Doctype declaration, and consuming applications should use internal Catalogs if they want to validate what they get over the wire.

I echo Sivonen’s reminder that you should declare a DTD when sending HTML, since browsers know to either ignore it or use a local version of the DTD.

Sivonen also mentions, in passing, the Billion Laughs attack. Which, to my shame, I’d missed.

“HTML, XML, JSON.”

Bill Humphries — Thu, 21 Dec 2006 23:10:19 +0000

Tim Bray has the right take on the JSON/XML kerfluffle.

Server-side blink tag

Bill Humphries — Tue, 25 Apr 2006 04:47:11 +0000

Re-implementing the blink tag in Ajax. [ via Waxy ]

Subscribing To hAtom Feeds With NetNewsWire

Bill Humphries — Tue, 28 Mar 2006 08:38:10 +0000

hAtom‘s not useful until you have a way to get from a blog’s summary page to an Atom feed. Chris Casciano wrote an AppleScript wrapping xsltproc that reads an hAtom page, applies the hAtom2Atom.xsl transform, and hands the result back to NetNewsWire.

Note: Scott Reynen points out that the script doesn’t work with NNW 2.1 beta.