Another way to namespace an Atom feed, except that very few aggregators can handle it.

Aristotle Pagaltzis: Who knows an XML document from a hole in the ground?

XML is hard.

This post first appeared on From the Belly of the Beasts, a weblog from some of the people who build O’Reilly websites.

Dare Obasanjo on Microformats vs. XML: Was the XML Vision Wrong?:

I’ve always considered it a gross hack to think that instead of having an HTML web page for my blog and an Atom/RSS feed, instead I should have a single HTML page with <div class="rss:item"> or <h3 class="atom:title"> embedded in it instead. However given that one of the inventors of XML (Tim Bray) is now advocating this approach, I wonder if I’m simply clinging to old ways and have become the kind of intellectual dinosaur I bemoan.

I find the idea of feed metadata stored within the actual index page of blog (presumably as a microformat) VERY compelling.

This post first appeared on From the Belly of the Beasts, a weblog from some of the people who build O’Reilly websites.

Tim Bray on Don’t Invent XML Languages:

Here’s a radical idea: don’t even think of making your own language until you’re sure that you can’t do the job using one of the Big Five: XHTML, DocBook, ODF, UBL, and Atom.

This post first appeared on From the Belly of the Beasts, a weblog from some of the people who build O’Reilly websites.

Let’s say I create the following entry in Movable Type 3.2. Five paragraphs with the middle three enclosed in a blockquote. Fairly standard blog post skeleton.

paragraph 1

<blockquote>
paragraph 2

paragraph 3

paragraph 4
</blockquote>

paragraph 5

What HTML do I want MT to produce as a result?

<p>paragraph 1</p>

<blockquote>
<p>paragraph 2</p>

<p>paragraph 3</p>

<p>paragraph 4</p>
</blockquote>

<p>paragraph 5</p>

What HTML does MT actually produce? Invalidly nested HTML. Fun.

<p>paragraph 1</p>

<blockquote>
paragraph 2

<p>paragraph 3</p>

<p>paragraph 4<br />
</blockquote></p>

<p>paragraph 5</p>

What a bummer. I would consider this a fairly critical bug. Oh, and WordPress gets this right. Workaround: manually mark up the paragraphs inside the blockquote. One more thing I wish I didn’t have to remember.

This post first appeared on From the Belly of the Beasts, a weblog from some of the people who build O’Reilly websites.

An interesting bit about how Seed magazine’s site was implemented in MT:

So, we pitched it. And, to our mild amazement, we won the gig. We were likely the underdogs, but I think our strong confidence in MT and our success with Sciencegate helped us out. Plus — we were passionate about the project. Seed is a new breed of science magazine, with truly lofty ideals, and we wanted to be part of that.

This post first appeared on From the Belly of the Beasts, a weblog from some of the people who build O’Reilly websites.