2009 Apr 7, 9:02
I'm a big fan of the concept of registerProtocolHandler in HTML 5 and in FireFox 3, but not quite the implementation. From a high level, it allows web apps to register themselves as
handlers of an URL scheme so for (the canonical) example, GMail can register for the mailto URL scheme. I like the concept:
- Better integration of web apps with your system.
- Its easy for web apps to do.
- Links to URNs can now take the user to the sites the user prefers for the sort of thing identified by the URN. For example, if I have a physical address in HTML, instead of making that an http
link to Yahoo Maps, I can make the link a geo scheme URI and those who follow the link will get their preferred mapping site that
has registered for that scheme. Actually, looking at the geo scheme's RFC, maybe I'd rather use some other URN scheme to represent the physical location, but you get the point.
However, the way its currently spec'ed out I don't like the following:
- There's no way to know if you are the handler for a particular URL scheme which is an important question for web app URL protocol handler authors.
- There's no way to fallback to an http URL in the case that a particular URL scheme isn't registered. A suggested solution to testing the registration of a scheme is for browsers to provide an additional script method
to check if a scheme is registered. I don't like the idea of writing script that walks over all my page's links and rewrites them based on that method. I'd much rather see a declarative and
backwards compatible fallback mechanism, although I don't know what that would look like.
- There's no way to register for a namespace within the urn scheme URI, the info scheme URI, or the tag scheme URI. I want to register
info:lccn/... (Library of Congress Card Number identifiers) to LibraryThing or Amazon and I want to register urn:duri:... (dated URIs) to the Web Archive, among other things.
- Will this result in a proliferation of unregistered URL schemes with clashing namespaces? The ESW Wiki notes why this would be bad.
- And last, although this is nitpickier than the rest, I don't like the '%s' syntax used in the registration method. I'd much rather pass in an URL template, like the URL template used
in OpenSearch. If an URL template is used for matching rather than registering against a particular URL scheme, this could also allow for registering a namespace within a URN. For example
something along the lines of:
registerProtocolHandler("info:lccn/{lccnID}", "htttp://www.librarything.com/search_works.php?q={lccnID}", "LibraryThing LCCN")
url template registerprotocolhandler firefox technical url scheme protocol boring html5 uri urn 2009 Apr 6, 10:40Charles Stross personal website that links to the text of a bunch of his short stories.
blog scifi fiction literature charles-stross 2009 Apr 3, 11:40"'SixthSense' is a wearable gestural interface that augments the physical world around us with digital information and lets us use natural hand gestures to interact with that information." The page
is a lot easier to read with styling turned off. Actually, skip the text just watch the TED video.
visualization design research mit hci mobile interactive ted 2009 Apr 1, 12:32Spped Rabbit Pizza's "IE8 Explorer" pizza: 8 slices, 8 ingredients, 8 Euros.
humor pizza ie8 ie france 2009 Apr 1, 10:42Lol at actual Facebook app that does IPv6 over Facebook. "...most network users are not aware of what IPv6 is or are even afraid by IPv6 because it is unknown. On the other hand, Social Networks
(like Facebook, LinkedIn, etc.) are well-known by users and the usage of those networks is huge... With IPv6 over Social Network (IPoSN): * Every user is a router with at least one loopback
interface; * Every friend or connection between users will be used as a point-to-point link... A working prototype has been developed by the author and is freely available: IPv6 over Facebook Social
Network [IPv6overFacebook]."
humor social network ipv6 ip iposn facebook ietf rfc 2009 Apr 1, 9:54Lol at end of final sentence: "Two Gmail accounts can happily converse with each other for up to three messages each. Beyond that, our experiments have shown a significant decline in the quality
ranking of Autopilot's responses and further messages may commit you to dinner parties or baby namings in which you have no interest."
humor google gmail ai email 2009 Apr 1, 9:48"For our latest mission, 30 Improv Everywhere agents found a random funeral in the obituary section of the newspaper and turned it into the best funeral ever... The family, especially the older
couple in the middle, were seriously mourning. They seemed to be focusing on the priest and mostly ignoring us. Still, we had to be as serious as we possibly could. If anyone cracked a smile or
giggled we would completely ruin the funeral for the family."
humor parody video improv-everywhere 2009 Apr 1, 9:32'To help stem the downward spiral of the United States economy Congress has proposed a new dollar symbol. "Updating fonts on the world's computers and devices would be a huge economic stimulus" said
one representative after a late night session of the newly formed House Subcommittee - Font Economic Stimulus Technology Relief (FESTR). "The dollar is a shadow of its former self and the new design
reflects this."'
art design humor font dollar-sign typography government economics 2009 Apr 1, 9:26"Open source code will contain text ads in comments and variable names, and Google and other text ad companies will scan the open source code repositories and fund the projects based on what they
find in the code"
humor opensource advertising code 2009 Mar 26, 2:24"Yesterday's remix challenge -- to mock the ridiculous new "anti-terrorism" posters the London police have put up that tell you to spy on your neighbors -- was a smashing success. I've collected the
25 or so that came in to date below". I enjoyed: "A bomb won't go off here because people tend to be quite nice really." "Terribly convenient, isn't it? Incriminating evidence left right out where
you'll spot it and call it in..." "A bomb won't go off here because the true likelihood of you being the victim of a terror attack is really very low, especially when compared to other causes of
death or injury."
humor politics poster paranoia security via:boingboing.comments photoshop privacy 2009 Mar 25, 10:09Bookmarklet to apply the Yahoo media player to any page that has mp3 links. "Take the player with you. Run my bookmarklet that will simply insert the required javascript into the page."
bookmarklet mp3 javascript music yahoo 2009 Mar 25, 4:51The Bad Science guy has a spot on the news on the topic of the poor reporting of science in the news.
science video ben-goldacre mmr media conspiracy immunization 2009 Mar 25, 3:49A flashy Flash 3d chart of the electromagnetic spectrum. Pretty.
art visualization science radio sound 3d design electromagnetic flash 2009 Mar 23, 6:19"GraphML Primer is a non-normative document intended to provide an easily readable description of the GraphML facilities, and is oriented towards quickly understanding how to create GraphML
documents."
graphml graph format xml howto reference w3c 2009 Mar 23, 12:58Details on a particular browser exploit and how its been resolved in IE8. "One approach they presented allowed attackers to use .NET framework DLL's to allocate executable pages of memory at
predictable locations within the iexplore.exe process. They were then able to demonstrate how .NET behavior could be combined with a separate exploitable memory corruption vulnerability to run
arbitrary code."
security ie8 ie browser hack via:ericlaw 2009 Mar 23, 9:41"So heres my trip to Chernobyl in pictures." Nice photo of the tree growing through the floor next to the chair. The whole set is like Fallout 3 but there's plants. Didn't realize plants could do
well in such a situation.
via:swannman photo history science nuclear russia chernobyl 2009 Mar 23, 8:13
I've made another extension for IE8,
Outline View, which gives you a side bar in IE that displays an outline of the current page and lets you make intrapage bookmarks.
The outline is generated based on the heading tags in the document (e.g. h1, h2, etc), kind of like what W3C's Semantic data extractor
tool displays for an outline. So if the page doesn't use heading tags the way the HTML spec intended or just sticks img tags in them, then the outline doesn't look so hot. On a page that does
use headings as intended though it looks really good. For instance a section from the HTML 4 spec shows up quite nicely and I find its
actually useful to be able to jump around to the different sections. Actually, I've been surprised going to various blogs how well the outline view is actually working -- I thought a lot more
webdevs would be abusing their heading tags.
I've also added intrapage bookmarks. When you make a text selection and clear it, that selected text is added as a temporary intrapage bookmark which shows up in the correct place in the outline.
You can navigate to the bookmark or right click to make it permanent. Right now I'm storing the permanent intrapage bookmarks in IE8's new per-domain DOM storage because I wanted to avoid writing
code to synchronize a cross process store of bookmarks, it allowed me to play with the DOM storage a bit, and the bookmarks will get cleared appropriately when the user clears their history via the
control panel.
technical intrapage bookmark boring html ie8 ie extension 2009 Mar 20, 5:03"This package contains header files and libraries to help you develop Windows applications that use Windows Internet Explorer."
ie8 ie msdn microsoft development C++ com visual-studio windows 2009 Mar 20, 10:10Its IE8 advertising that doesn't make me cringe. On the contrary it has Ask a Ninja, Janeane Garofalo, and several comedians I recall collectively from either 'I Love the [decade]' or 'Best Week
Ever'.
humor video ie8 advertising via:louis 2009 Mar 20, 6:18
IE8, the software I've been working on for some time now, has finally been released at MIX09.
As I mentioned previously, I worked on
accelerators (previously named
Activities) in IE8. Looking at the
kinds of things I blog about on the IE Blog, you might also
correctly guess that I work on the networking stack. Ask me about what else I worked on during IE8 development. The past few months were very busy for me and I'm happy this is finally out.
technical internet explorer ie8
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