Microformats: Path to Sematic Web?

In the past I have looked into technologies promising to lead us to the promised land of Semantic Web. RDF and OWL are a couple of examples. Though they are powerful and capable formats they are a bit of a chore to come up to speed on and not to easy to implement into something usable and scalable. You see folks using them to solve specific problems in niche and primarily vertical scopes but you don’t seem to see signs of any widespread adoption by the masses.

Then comes along Microformates. From what I’ve read, XFN is what evolved into the first microformat. Today there are many more useful formats. MF’s are sort of a grassroots effort to stitch semantics into the content being published to the web by those who do much of the publishing. Some of the microfomat goals are to solve specific real world problems, start as simple as possible, and reuse existing, widely adopted standards. These concepts make microformats very easy to pick up and start utilizing immediately.

Links I found useful

Tagged web standards

Character Encoding 101

Although the discussion of character encoding for web developers is vast, This article by Tommy Olsson on Sitepoint is a great starting point. It does a supurb job of explaining the basics and defining the needed terms.
Another great article on encoding is over at Joel On Software
Tagged web standards

Ajax In Action

Authors: Dave Crane, Eric Pascarello, Darren James

Publisher: Manning Publications

Copyright: 2005

ISBN: 1932394613

Pages: 680

Price: Street: $44.95 Amazon: $29.67

Rating: 8/10

Table of contents: Part 1 Rethinking the web application 1

1 A new design for the Web 3 2 First steps with Ajax 31 3 Introducing order to Ajax 69
Part 2 Core techniques 117
4 The page as an application 119 5 The role of the server 159
Part 3 Professional Ajax 209
6 The user experience 211 7 Security and Ajax 246 8 Performance 279
Part 4 Ajax by example 325
9 Dynamic double combo 327 10 Type-ahead suggest 361 11 The enhanced Ajax web portal 423 12 Live search using XSLT 466 13 Building stand-alone applications with Ajax 503
appendix A The Ajax craftsperson’s toolkit 561 appendix B JavaScript for object-oriented programmers 589 appendix C Ajax frameworks and libraries 619

Review: With my Java background, I have read a few of the “In action” series by Manning Publications, as they are often recommended reading in the Java circles. I must say I’ve always been pleased with these texts as they are well written and fulfill their goal of exploring very relevant real world examples. It seems now that Manning Publications is branching out a bit from their primarily Java works past and have set out to tackle the mother of all buzz words at the moment - AJAX. If you are of the few who have not heard of AJAX or Asynchronous JavaScript and XML, see here.

I have read many articles and even one other book on the subject of AJAX. I learned from all of them but they all seemed to be selling AJAX as “Look at this new toy, and look at these cool widgety things you can do with it!”. From page 1, Ajax In Action takes a much more structured and holistic approach. If you take a look at what the book defined as “The four defining principles of AJAX”, you get an idea of what I mean…
  • The browser hosts an application, not content.
  • The server delivers data, not content.
  • The user interacts continuously with the application, and most requests to the server are implicit rather than explicit.
  • Our codebase is large, complex, and well structured. It is a first-class citizen in our architecture, and we must take good care of it.
So who is this book for? The book realizes that AJAX is a very cross-discipline technology and is written to accommodate those coming to the technology from various backgrounds; CS degree wielding developers, desktop app coders, technically savvy designers, etc. Client-side (JavaScript), OO programming is the main focus and the server-side examples are purposely kept general and simple so no matter what your server-side language of choice is, you’ll be able to interpret the examples in the book. This book is divided into four parts…
  • Part 1 clears the buzzword fog around AJAX and will tell you exactly what it is, explains why it is a useful addition to your development toolbox, and suggests a few tools that can make you successful building applications with it.
  • Part 2 covers the core techniques that make an AJAX application work in terms of design patterns and best practices.
  • Part 3 discusses how to deal with concerns such as usability, security, and performance in order to go from proof of concept to production-ready software.
  • Part 4 gets down to business and leads you through the step-by-step development of five AJAX projects. Then as a bonus you are shown how to refactor these apps into drop-in components that you can use in your own web applications.
As a whole the authors do an excellent job of covering AJAX. Their stance of treating AJAX as a fully fledged application framework on it own and that structured, patterned development techniques are required for successful projects is realistic and welcomed. The examples are “real-world” and relevant, such as “live search” and “web portals”. As is expected, each successive part of the book builds on the previous content. Often examples in the book are presented as a first edition that functions well, but then the examples are refactored to make them more scalable and re-useable. This “get something that works and then make it better” style is refreshing to see as it is how most of us actually code in the real life. If you are looking for a “cookbook” style text with example after example hurled at you, this book may not be for you but for those of you looking for a new approach to web application design, you’ve come to the right place. As many of the “In Action” books in the past, I feel Ajax In Action is destined to be added to the standard reading list for anyone interested in serious AJAX development. Related links: Sample Chapters, Source Code, etc What the #@!& in AJAX Book at Amazon
Tagged Book Review web standards