Mon, Dec 22, 2003
Church of Purple: The IDs the Thing
#
Some interesting posts in the blogosphere today that are relevant to
PurpleNumbers. First, SebPaquet
pointed to
MattMower's recent
"Show Anchors"
bookmarklet, which displays named anchors on an HTML page. It's a
good hack, and it will hopefully encourage people to do more
fine-grained linking, which is one reason for PurpleNumbers. (NW)
Second, BillSeitz referenced BobDuCharme?'s
article earlier this year on
the deprecation of the "name" attribute for the new (but optional)
"id" attribute in HTML, and
asked whether this is relevant to PurpleNumbers. It's very relevant.
Widespread use of ID attributes will hopefully make people understand
the value of stable IDs for addressing (as opposed to the relative
addressing enabled by things like XPointer). (NX)
PurpleNumbers are about two things: Making people aware of
fine-grained addressability, and assigning stable IDs to each of these
chunks. The former is what most people see, but good UIs will
eventually (hopefully) make this feature irrelevant. The latter is
the truly important contribution. (NY)
As an aside, earlier this month, what started as an innocent
question
about blogging on the CollaborationCollaboratory turned into a
massive discussion about many things, including PurpleNumbers. At one
point, I casually
threw out the term, "ChurchOfPurple," which ChrisDent and I had often
used in our private conversations. Woe was me. (O0)
We have a lot of smart members and some great discussions. The truth,
however, is that half of our members are crazy. PeterJones embodies
our group's split personality, mixing in profound comments with
witticisms that usually leave me shaking my head and holding my sides.
Peter decided that all good churches require a T-shirt, hymn, and
Bible, and he proposed a few candidates for the latter. Chris has
already
blogged Peter's ChurchOfPurple hymn (a merciless parody of
JimmyHendrix?'s Purple Haze). Here's Peter's
excerpt from the Book of Purple: (O1)
And lo, Engelbart looked down upon the text and saw that there were unidentified paragraphs, and that the lack of identifiers was a pestilence upon the augmentation. (O2)
Perhaps deciding that Peter wasn't being silly enough, Chris
concocted a
logo for the ChurchOfPurple, which I have dutifully added to this
blog. (O3)
Out of the silliness emerged perhaps the
best example for why we need PurpleNumbers, courtesy of MattSchneider
(and also
blogged by Chris). Matt recounted an encounter with his then 82-year
old father: (O4)
I handed him a Bible and Hawaii (he's a big Michener fan). I asked him to quickly turn to paragraph 536 of Hawaii. He looked over the top of his glasses at me. I smiled and then asked him to turn to Psalm 23:4. Light went on. (O5)
/tech/purple |
Posted at 3:51pm
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