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Showing posts from January, 2009

Microformat rel-tags are a broken spec

In my current pet project I do a fair amount of parsing of rel-tags (the microformat spec for "tagging"). At first I got a bit agitated how many occurrences there are where the spec is not implemented correctly. But I have come to realize that the spec is simply broken. There are two ways I can think of a spec to be broken: If it's internally inconsistent or inconsistent with other specs. If it's somehow useless. The rel-tag is almost 1.), which makes it a little bit of 2.). Here's why: the spec says that this tag <a href="http://technorati.com/tag/tech" rel="tag">fish</a> denotes "tech" rather than "fish." This means that this microformat restricts the URL space on your server. You need to have the "tag" folder and in it there must be a file "tech" - unless you link to another site which is not a solution to the problem. Being able to control my own URL space is one of the pronciples of the

One button - endless possibilities

By pure chance I found a useful feature on my iPhone: when you play music but have another application in the foreground double-clicking "the" button will bring up a mini iPod control. That's nice e.g. for skipping a song without having to leave the app in the foreground. Related news from the Macworld: Apple Introduces Revolutionary New Laptop With No Keyboard