Mon, Jul 02, 2007
purple-include: Granular Transclusions for the Common Man #
Many thanks to JonathanCheyer, CraigLatta, and KaliyaHamlin for coming to the HyperScope sprint this past weekend, and special thanks to ChristinaEngelbart for hosting. Also thanks to ThomCherryhomes and others who hung out with us on IRC. The notes from the day are up on the Wiki, and I put up some pictures as well. (MEL)
The big news, though, is that Brad, Jonathan, and I wrote a cool hack called purple-include, based on MarkNottingham's most excellent hinclude. It lets you transclude granular chunks of content from any web site by using an img-like tag. Check out the examples. I think this will go a long way in making TransClusions more common on the Web. (MEN)
You address granular content either by using a fragment identifier that the document author provides (such as a PurpleNumber) or by using an XPath expression. Thanks to TonyChang for his cool interactive XPath tester. (MEO)
The planned next step is to create a Firefox plugin that adds a "Transclude" option when you right click inside of a browser text widget. This will allow you to transclude copied content, rather than paste it. Don't know whether any of us will get to this soon, so we encourage the lazy web and all you Firefox hackers to beat us to the punch. (MEP)
This was my first non-trivial foray into JavaScript, and I was disturbed by what I saw. The language itself is not horrible, although its object system makes Perl 5 look like SmallTalk. What's shameful is its API support. We had to use a very ugly, although apparently common hack to get a DOM of external web pages. This is pure silliness. The browser is already doing the hard work of parsing broken HTML and XML and turning it into a DOM. Why not easily expose that functionality to the developer? (MEQ)
As Brad dryly noted, "Welcome to my world." (MER)
/tech/purple | Posted at 11:36pm
Sun, Jul 01, 2007
Brad Neuberg on Inventing with Values #
A few months ago, my friend, BradNeuberg, gave the keynote at Yahoo's internal Front-End Engineering Summit. The video is now online, and it's worth watching. Brad's not only a great guy and a great hacker, he's an excellent speaker. He speaks from the heart with intensity and good humor. (ME6)
I want to highlight four things Brad said: (ME7)
- A good way to approach invention is, "I Against I." (The name comes from a classic punk song from the mid-80s.) Don't worry about what others will do. Instead of trying to protect your ideas by putting up walls, compete against yourself. If you're going to be put to pasture by somebody, it might as well be by you. And as Brad points out, no ideas are safe. In this day and age, you will be put to pasture. (ME8)
- Brad's section on values was tremendous. He cited two techniques for clarifying values. The first was "Mob Rule." If you were the only thing between an angry mob and some other thing, what thing would cause you to stand your ground? This reminds me of something AlanDershowitz said in the best class I ever took in college. Dershowitz said that he was willing to die for freedom of speech. I was astounded by that statement, and it made me think about the values that I was willing to die for. (ME9)
- The second technique was, "The Last Speech." Imagine you were about to leave your company and that you were asked to deliver a final speech. What would you say? This actually happened. A decade ago, JamesGosling was fed up with Sun and decided to leave. ScottMcNealy asked Gosling to write a letter before he left, explaining what he would do differently if he were in charge. Gosling outlined a vision which ultimately led to him staying at Sun and creating Java. (MEA)
- Brad ended his section on values with a story about ArchieRand, the famous expressionist painter who was one of Brad's professors at Columbia. Rand used to walk around the room as his students worked, look at them with his eyes blazing, and say, "This shit matters." (MEB)
Each of these things are worth thinking about and trying. (MEC)
/tech | Posted at 10:42pm
