A friend of mine just showed me a use of google-docs where he published an excel sheet inside an iframe.
This made me wonder if it would be possible to implement in browsers a support for ODF files inside of XHTML.
Some browsers already have support for some XML files like SVG, why not ODF as well?
I think it would be cool.
Showing posts with label Web. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Web. Show all posts
Saturday, February 2, 2008
Thursday, January 17, 2008
Wikipedia for experts
Scholarpedia is a new wikipedia style encyclopedia, or should it be called an encyclopedia when it is not meant to cover everything from the smallest to the biggest?
Scholarpedia is supposed to be a specialized wikipedia where experts in their fields write about the stuff they know about. So it is supposed to take subjects from wikipedia like saltatory conduction and make a pretty in depth article about it by an expert in the field. When the first article is created a curator is nominated for the article and every time someone wants to edit the article the edits go through the curator first and he decides if the edits are appropriate or not. It's not a completely free editing encyclopedia but almost (of course people could get dissatisfied with the curator, how the community of scholarpedia will react to that I have no idea).
Hope it will do good and get more physics articles in there :-)
At the moment it is more focused on computer engineering and biology related articles.
Scholarpedia is supposed to be a specialized wikipedia where experts in their fields write about the stuff they know about. So it is supposed to take subjects from wikipedia like saltatory conduction and make a pretty in depth article about it by an expert in the field. When the first article is created a curator is nominated for the article and every time someone wants to edit the article the edits go through the curator first and he decides if the edits are appropriate or not. It's not a completely free editing encyclopedia but almost (of course people could get dissatisfied with the curator, how the community of scholarpedia will react to that I have no idea).
Hope it will do good and get more physics articles in there :-)
At the moment it is more focused on computer engineering and biology related articles.
Friday, August 3, 2007
Learn your geography!
I see this quite a few times. Some people actually don't know that Iceland belongs to Europe!
The latest I have noticed is on the web of the BBC it self. They should know better. Have a look at this flash animation and hover your mouse over Iceland and see which continent is highlighted along with Iceland.
The latest I have noticed is on the web of the BBC it self. They should know better. Have a look at this flash animation and hover your mouse over Iceland and see which continent is highlighted along with Iceland.
Sunday, July 29, 2007
XHTML
One thing caught my attention today about the use of XHTML. The standard says that these kind of web pages should be sent with a MIME type set to application/xhtml+xml but today most web programmers send it with the normal html mime type of text/html. This you can see by looking at the source of the web pages and in its header there is usually something like the following code (this one is from wikipedia.org):
<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN"
"http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd">
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" xml:lang="en" lang="en"
dir="ltr">
<head>
<meta equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8">
This says that the document is an XHTML type document but it is sent as a text/html instead of application/xhtml+xml and according to this discussion can even be harmful to send it like that. So what is it that happens when a browser views a XHTML document sent as a text/html? Well, it basically treats the document as a normal html instead of XHTML so the troubles that the programmers have gone through to make the document XHTML complient were all in vein and all the XHTML advantages cant be used.
Why is it important? An example is this text. The Safari browser supposedly (I dont have a MAC so I cant test this) cant display this simple text because it contains XHTML code in it and Safari trying to be more clever than it is says that this is an XHTML document (which it isnt, it is just plain text) and then it sees code there that is not XHTML and like it is supposed to do, it doesnt display this page (if a browser gets code that it thinks is XHTML and it doesnt understand it then it is supposed to not display the page).
Another thing is that Internet Explorer doesnt know what to do with application/xhtml+xml. The product of one of the richest company in the world doesnt know what to do with a simple mime type, what are they using all their man power for? Ohhh yes ... now I remember, law suits! :-)
I think the main point of this rant here is that I think web developers should not start using XHTML at the moment, I dont think the browsers are ready for it.
<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN"
"http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd">
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" xml:lang="en" lang="en"
dir="ltr">
<head>
<meta equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8">
This says that the document is an XHTML type document but it is sent as a text/html instead of application/xhtml+xml and according to this discussion can even be harmful to send it like that. So what is it that happens when a browser views a XHTML document sent as a text/html? Well, it basically treats the document as a normal html instead of XHTML so the troubles that the programmers have gone through to make the document XHTML complient were all in vein and all the XHTML advantages cant be used.
Why is it important? An example is this text. The Safari browser supposedly (I dont have a MAC so I cant test this) cant display this simple text because it contains XHTML code in it and Safari trying to be more clever than it is says that this is an XHTML document (which it isnt, it is just plain text) and then it sees code there that is not XHTML and like it is supposed to do, it doesnt display this page (if a browser gets code that it thinks is XHTML and it doesnt understand it then it is supposed to not display the page).
Another thing is that Internet Explorer doesnt know what to do with application/xhtml+xml. The product of one of the richest company in the world doesnt know what to do with a simple mime type, what are they using all their man power for? Ohhh yes ... now I remember, law suits! :-)
I think the main point of this rant here is that I think web developers should not start using XHTML at the moment, I dont think the browsers are ready for it.
Thursday, May 3, 2007
MathML
Was fiddling around with MathML this night and just could not get it to work correctly for the servers I have access to. I can make my own html files on both klaki and my school and tried both of them (see here and here for the results) and both of them gave out the wrong Content-Type so that firefox did not recognise them as xml files and displayed them wrongly. My solution was to put a .htaccess file in the directory with the files where the content was just
AddType application/xhtml+xml xhtml xht
This tells the apache web server that each file with the extension xhtml or xht should be sent out with the Content-Type application/xhtml+xml.
For those who have no idea what I am talking about then with each web page that you fetch from the net then there is a little header that you dont see and in that header there is a line of the form
Content-Type text/html
if the file is a normal html file. This line tells the web browser what kind of file he is looking at and then the web browser decides what to do with the file based on this information. Firefox relies solely on this line but IE looks into the content of the file and tries to guess what kind of file it is. So if this Content-Type is wrong for a xhtml file then Firefox does not display it correctly which was happening to me so I had to make the servers on those machines send out the right Content-Type so that my browser would know what to do with them. Since I dont have administration right to neither of those servers then I had to do it on my own work space. Apache server has this .htaccess file that overrides the default server configuration (if that is allowed by the administrators that is).
Pretty nifty ayhh?
I like this mathml idea, this could lead out to better math publishing on the net, with the use of SVG and mathml then science authors would not need to publish using pdf anymore and the user would not have to have a pdf viewer on his computer :-)
Unfortunately then IE does not provide support for mathml yet, but there are plugins available for it that can let you view such files. Firefox has builtin support for mathml.
AddType application/xhtml+xml xhtml xht
This tells the apache web server that each file with the extension xhtml or xht should be sent out with the Content-Type application/xhtml+xml.
For those who have no idea what I am talking about then with each web page that you fetch from the net then there is a little header that you dont see and in that header there is a line of the form
Content-Type text/html
if the file is a normal html file. This line tells the web browser what kind of file he is looking at and then the web browser decides what to do with the file based on this information. Firefox relies solely on this line but IE looks into the content of the file and tries to guess what kind of file it is. So if this Content-Type is wrong for a xhtml file then Firefox does not display it correctly which was happening to me so I had to make the servers on those machines send out the right Content-Type so that my browser would know what to do with them. Since I dont have administration right to neither of those servers then I had to do it on my own work space. Apache server has this .htaccess file that overrides the default server configuration (if that is allowed by the administrators that is).
Pretty nifty ayhh?
I like this mathml idea, this could lead out to better math publishing on the net, with the use of SVG and mathml then science authors would not need to publish using pdf anymore and the user would not have to have a pdf viewer on his computer :-)
Unfortunately then IE does not provide support for mathml yet, but there are plugins available for it that can let you view such files. Firefox has builtin support for mathml.
Tuesday, April 10, 2007
gmail and firefox
I use gmail now for my mail, and firefox as my main web browser. One thing that I like about firefox is its ability to have multiple tabs open and save them when I exit it and reopen all my tabs when I open it again so I enter my browsing experience just like I left it. But it is slow on an old computer like mine is (I only have 256 MB of memory which I think is the important factor here) so I try to keep the flags to a minimum (I usually have about 10 open though between sessions). One flag that I always had open was my gmail but not any more after I found this extension to it. Now I have a little gmail notification at the bottom of my browser and a number behind it that tells me how many mails I have unread in my mailbox, pretty nifty.
Sunday, April 1, 2007
RÚV is modernising
RÚV (Ríkistútvarpið) is the government radio in Iceland and is slowly modernising itself, the latest effort is the podcast. So Icelanders at home and abroad, go knock yourself out. To bad it requires iTunes which doesn't run on linux :-)
Thursday, March 15, 2007
Nice picture
I like this picture. It shows how the Cassini spacecraft saw an eclipse of the sun behind Saturn. Higher resolution pictures are available to the right of the picture. If you look at one of the higher resolution picture then you can see a small dot to the left above one of the main rings, that is our little earth.
Saturday, January 20, 2007
BBC API
A friend of mine just pointed out to me that the BBC have given out a application programming interface to their services, some people have cought up with this and made use with it and others have just come up with ideas of how this could be used. This could be neat, I like a lot of the programs on BBC World and find theyr website not so transparant to navigate maby I can make an interface to theyr programs that are available online using this service in a better way.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)