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The Semantic Web

Dan Cederholm over at SimpleBits started a bit of a feeding frenzy when he posted his SimpleQuiz - a collection of questions about preferred markup technique. He's now gathered them all together and picked out some of the more notable comments. You might also like to take a look at some of the pieces that inspired the quiz, in particular Standards don't necessarily have anything to do with being semantically correct, which explains how coding pages in standards compliant XHTML does not necessarily make them semantically useful, and, more specifically, Tantek Celik's A Touch of Class, a must see for gratuitous class attribute users (and reforming ones like my good self).

And for some background, Semantic Web at the W3C and SemanticWeb.org.

But if you're new to the idea of semantic markup, this great introductory tutorial from Brainstorms and Raves is an excellent place to start.

And in other news

Today I'm only slightly off topic, with this piece from the Vocabula Review: Singular They: The Pronoun That Came in from the Cold, which points out, among other interesting things, that the practice of using "they" as a gender-free third-person singular pronoun, as opposed to "he", is a lot older than you might think.

Layout for busy people

You've probably all seen List-o-matic, the nifty little tool from the good people at Accessify.com that lets you create nice looking CSS-styled lists, ready to be used as navigation panels, in a Wizard like environment. Well, in the same spirit Inknoise now bring you Layout-o-matic. Just choose the specs of the multi-column layout you're looking for, and the Layout-o-matic will generate you some nice clean CSS+HTML for you to download and fill up with your own content. Check it out.

Re(post)modernising

Here's a nice introduction from kuro5hin to Fernando Pessoa, a Portuguese literary mastermind born in 1888. Pessoa dedicated his life to the creation of elaborate heteronyms: fictional personae or literary alter egos created through the publications, letters and other writings of a single human being. I have to wonder whether Borges may have been one of his creations. And it certainly makes Australia's famous Ern Malley Affair seem very desultory indeed.

But the unregenerate hankered after tables

For a while yet the converted are still going to face the tiresome task of convincing the unregenerate of the virtues of web standards. The Business Value of Web Standards by Jeffrey Veen is a nice succinct piece to point in the direction of those who still hanker after the old ways. Speaks of the actual experience of reworking the Adaptive Path site for standards compliance.

And from the department of "I'd like to see that"

A voluntary recall of the Segway Scooter has been announced. From the CPSC announcement: "Under certain operating conditions, particularly when the batteries are near the end of charge, some Segway HTs may not deliver enough power, allowing the rider to fall." Sounds like hours of fun for creators and watchers of Funniest Home Videos, as well as an explanation for this - and the ungenerous amongst us all thought it was just another piece of evidence...

What better way....

to start a blog about web standards than to point you in the direction of TBL's recent Royal Society lecture, The future of the World Wide Web now available as video on demand, requiring Realplayer, and IE5 or higher :-) And to really recreate the whole experience in the privacy of your own home, here's the slides.

And in other news

Vale Edward Said. I'm not going to point to the NYT obituary because I didn't like it's tone. Instead, here's a piece he wrote recently, adapted from the introduction to a new edition of Orientalism.