Ubiquity fun (at the Scripting Challenge)

The PSW command I told you about in the previous post was my entry for the Scripting Challenge at the Scripting and Development for the Semantic Web Workshop, which took place on Sunday, in Crete, collocated with ESWC 2009. The challenge idea is to create a < 1000 lines script which uses the Semantic Web to create real-world applications.

I couldn't go there to present it, so I created a screencast / demo to replace my live presentation:



Unfortunately I didn't win, it was the Researchers map that took the prize this year, but I got quite nice feedback (thanks everybody!) and new Twitter friends :). Also, it was very fun from one end to the other: from creating the script, to the paper describing the script, to creating the screencast (interesting experience, long live recordMyDesktop and mencoder) and getting feedback about it almost live on Twitter and Facebook, as the scripts were presented at the workshop and I was home having (late) lunch.

I'm now working on advancing the idea, to also have it a part of my MSc (that's why blogging takes a while, because MSc takes the other whiles in my life :) ).

End of Summer < Web />

So it's gone now. It was a very fine workshop with talks on all kind of topics: it started with Mădălina Cocea's journalism 2.0 on Saturday morning, then went through Marius Măruşteri's medical collaborative systems and Sergiu's web accessibility standards presentations and Ştefan Tăbăranu's presentation of Levi 9. Then, a short coffee break (oh, btw, veeery good coffee). Then, when we just got more into the "tech stuff" we went out of it again with Alina's presentation on e-business in relation with semantic/data web, Radu Sora's presentation on how to be a successful programmer in a company where you have so many other things to deal with besides programming, and Cristian Bârlădeanu's presentation on developing a web product by one's self, in a failure minimizing manner. Coffee break, again, and then we got back in the tech stuff with Andrei Iacob's presentation on Silverlight (I was eagerly waiting for this one, since I read about it a couple of days ago and I was very curious to see it in action – we had some demos as well) and Augustin Ciobotaru's SQL injection demo. Unfortunately, I couldn't stay for Bogdan Pistol's presentation on ArgoEclipse.


The second day (which is today, but will be yesterday by the time I will have posted this), we got heavy teched with Caty's presentation on mash-ups (again, a very interesting thing to learn more about), my presentation on microformats, Marius Butuc's presentation on XHTML 2.0 (with some fine demos) and Sorin Damian's presentation of Visual Studio ORCAS (with some code as well). Again, coffee break (it seems we had some cookies left from the other day).
Then we watched the youngsters in competition (the web applications competition) and realized that indeed they had a lot of things to learn from our tutorials – if only they had listened carefully enough. After a British Council offer presentation, we got our prizes and dropped a goodbye tear for this year's edition (there were the prizes for the competition and some 'public awards' for the 'performers' as well – I got a fine 'Java for web applications' book).


The pictures are here (I hope I will not crash in bed tonight before I add the captions so you know what's it about) – there will be a selection and only a few of them will remain online but for the moment they're all up there.


Despite my concerns on the presentations I had to make, seemingly it went fine – it could have been better but hey, I'm not perfect every day!


Yes, I really got the taste of it, waiting for the next...
(sigh)

Here we go again...

Yes, I do stare at XML all day long


Just when I thought I saw everything...
Today, Yahoo! Tech!
First of all, there is a special reason for which the guys that designed microformats figured out a method of specifying uids for each of the microformats: when parsing the same page twice, we MUST have a way of testing microformats equality to realize that we already know the precious info one has to offer! So, yahoo tech guys, you might wanna add a rel='self' (or rel='bookmark' or anything that would mean 'id', with its most permissive interpretation) to the 'a' tag in the title of the review!

First-and-a-half of all, the 'description' of the yahoo tech review is its 'item fn' as well. (according to this, the text of the review and the formatted name of the item are semantically equivalent) Now what could that mean? Hmmm... Seemingly, that it's reviewing the "I bought this product 2 days ago and I think is really cool" item. Is this just because 'item' is required and some 'specification compliant' programmer thought he/she should stuff it in somehow?

Second of all (and this is the cool part – I tend to keep good things for the ending), the short review links to a 'longer', 'one-on-the-page' review, through that 'a' tag I mentioned. But guess what: NO hreview markup AT ALL on this new page. Nothing. Empty. Stupid simple html. Pleaaaase, have mercy!

Notice now how I am writing my post in a conversation-like manner: because Neil was so kind to react, I am probably expecting that to happen again (yeah, dream on!).

Now I decided that I REALLY should do something to prevent things like this in the future: and I will start by highlighting some 'tips on how not to screw up semantics' in my presentation on microformats. Even if it won't change anything, at least I will be sure I tried my best.

Microformatted week

First of all I must mention that last week I was pleasantly surprised to see the reactions to my post about Summer <Web /> online.
I must thank Edward and Neil for their immediate responses (changed markup on eventful and added summer web on upcoming). Also, I was surprised (and happy) to notice that the class=url's on upcoming are now attached only to the right elements, yeeeeey!

(I also noticed that Tantek Çelik was wearing an upcoming T-shirt at the microformats dinner at web 2.0 expo. I want one too!)

Second of all, I've just started v0.3 pre-alpha of my Bsc project. I also have a print screen of v2.0 "in action". I was just browsing microformateurs.org (using the dev firefox profile by mistake) and it highlighted the microformats dinner event:



Now don't get enthusiastic, it's just the urlRecommender outlier there... :), no 'smart' predictions yet.

I also thought of some things to mention in my microformats presentation at summer <Web /> to make it cool and attractive for everyone and to tease the developers.

And, I almost forgot to mention, I am now a very happy listener of Queen - Greatest Hits, volumes I, II and III.

So it's a joyfull, microformatted lunch I'm having right now:
<div class="hLunch">
<span class="mainCourse">
<a href="http://www.epicurious.com/recipes/recipe_views/views/230458" rel="vote-for">Yummy potato moussaka</a>
</span>
with
<span class="drink">sparkling water</span></div>.

Summer <Web /> online

Since everybody is blogging and spreading the word about it (well, at least Sabin Buraga and Alina Mierluş) I thought I should contribute too: I started submitting the thing online, to "major" events websites: Eventful and Upcoming.
I had some fun with that tag in the title of the event, but the great discovery was that, as opposed to upcoming's policy on url classes, eventful just does not allow you to add an url (a class="url") for your event. At all. Whatever you do, wherever you add your link, it will not be THE url of the vevent. Their class="url" is for the permalink of the event on eventful. That is, still on their website. I wonder if this is marketing (all events homepages are on eventful) or just plain wrong applied semantics, AGAIN.

The happy end of this story is this.

For the upcoming story there is no happy-end: I couldn't add FCS as a venue on upcoming (I tried like 3-4 times):

and because you cannot add events without venues, summer <Web/> 2007 is not on Upcoming. Yet. I'll try again the next days, maybe this is only because of the changes they're going through now (merging upcoming accounts with yahoo accounts), though I can't see any connection.

Does anyone know if there is a Romanian events website? We should submit it there, too...

Oh, and I shouldn't forget to mention that I will be talking about microformats at Summer <Web/> 2007. See you there!

Far from a better world...

Motto: the optimists say we are living in the best possible world. The pessimists fear so!

Anyone missed my outraged posts on idiot markup and stupid programmers?
I thought so!

Upcoming.org seems to have had a checkbox on their hiring form saying:
"Are you a dumb head that cannot cope with correct semantic markup?"
and hired only the ones that checked it!

My newest discovery regarding the upcoming.org markup (no, I will not go insane from reading XML all day long) is that they just throw URL's (class="url") wherever they feel to! Their event details page is one huuuuge vevent div stuffed with all sorts of things (let's not discuss about this now, they're not the only sinners), among which a list of all users attending to / watching the event. Since those are users, of course they also have user pages on upcoming. Why not put the link to the user page here? Why not add a 'url' class to that link? So, it's enough to write your simple XPath to the url of the event and you'll get yourself a list full of crap (the more people attending the event, the more crap in your event url list!). The author of the event (the one that posted it on their wonderful website) is also a user and the link to him/her is also a url class link. Inside the vevent div as well, why not?

I would really like to know what those guys think "semantic markup / microformats" mean...

The w3b: 2day and tomorrow

Documenting for the bsc and in actually no mood of doing it (yes, Buraga WILL kill me!), I stumbled upon an article on Metacrap.
You might find it resembling to my article on tags here-and-there.
And I know, you already knew all that stuff, it's obvious, isn't it?

Anyway, it made me ask myself: does web converge asimptotically to 3.0? That is, are we going there but will never actually GET there?
Either way, for its beauty it is worth...

Towards a better world...

Why people ignore tagging?

I mean, it's the bloody future of the web, and they just ignore it: either don't tag stuff or they tag it with the slow, non-functional part of their brains.
When I found out about upcoming.org using hCalendars, I thought: oh goodie, gold mine: semantically marked events, free test data for my bsc!!!
BUT (the omnipresent 'but'), when I really started scraping it, I found out that figuring out semantics it's haaaard and misinterpreting standards (or recommendations, not to be so harsh) might be a hobby for some: gorgious abbr-locations, with void titles: I mean title="". Then why the f did you put that location class there in the first place?
And, to get back to the tags (which is the reason of this post)... take a look at the Sun mashup event today... Interesting, is it? BUT how am I suppose to discover it if it isn't tagged at all??? And this is not some mistake of an author, it's a habit (lots of events don't have tags at all).
I wonder, is it because upcoming DOES NOT have a field for tags in the 'add event' form? Hmmm... or because the 'add tag' button is pretty hidden on the event page? (it took me a while to find it. I admit, when I analyzed the tags of the events I was looking at the markup).

So which people are we talking about ignoring tagging? We might be talking as well about the developers: it's them who should realize the importance of tags and make it easier for users to produce tagged content. But since upcoming is 'a Yahoo company', I'm not surprised: it's not their first and personally, I'm expecting more...

If some developers don't realize the importance of semantic markup, maybe users do, and maybe it's us who should start the 'web revolution': your favourite events site does not provide tagging? Report it to the developers, send an email, make a request, state your wish for a better world! The website you upload your pictures to does not tag them? Change it! there are a lot of sites that do! Flood the upcoming mailbox with your requests to a decent tagging process so that next time you would be able to find out about the Sun mashup event...