City LifeCity LifeBreaking Things That Aren't Fixable- February 24, 2005 Everybody talks about how bad it is to fix things that aren&8216;t broken. It&8216;s time somebody spoke up about the evils of breaking things that aren&8216;t fixable. This happens any time somebody tries to fix a fundamentally bad design by layering more features on it. Or a fundamentally unfixable problem by passing more laws against it. In the U.S. every time someone commits a crime that attracts a lot of attention, lawmakers rush in to make more things illegal and increase the...http://www.jroller.com/bobfoster/entry/breaking_things_that_aren_t Ask Your Doctor- February 15, 2005 Scene: Darkness. Male voice (embarrassed): Sorry, honey. Female voice (soothing): Don&8216;t worry about it, dear. It can happen to anybody. Scene: Lights come up to reveal male and female programmers working side-by-side. The male&8216;s desk and monitor are stacked with papers and manuals of all descriptions, with barely room for the keyboard. A quart bottle of Jolt is precariously balanced atop one of the stacks. The female&8216;s desk is bare except for monitor, keyboard and half-pint.http://www.jroller.com/bobfoster/entry/ask_your_doctor Still In The Hole- February 15, 2005 In all fairness, in yesterday's blog I trivialized how entities are used in practice by sophisticated XML developers. They are not just little macros that allow authors to save a few keystrokes. Parameter entities, which are effective only within a DTD, are actually much more powerful than general entities. For example, a parameter entity reference can appear in the element name context of an <!ELEMENT declaration, allowing DTDs to be written in terms of parameters that any document author..http://www.jroller.com/bobfoster/entry/still_in_the_hole Digging Out Of The DTD Hole- February 14, 2005 If you ever want to get into a dogfight, suggest on xml-dev that XML might be improved in some future revision by subsetting what we have now. Then watch the fur fly! A rational thread runs through all the bombast and calumny that will be heaped upon your head: an XML that is not forward-compatible with the current version could cause problems for current applications. It could cause even more problems for current documents, if authors of XML parsers (like, say, Microsoft) decided to stop...http://www.jroller.com/bobfoster/entry/digging_out_of_the_dtd MacWorld Redux- February 7, 2005 Just re-read a blog from a couple weeks ago that promised I'd come back with more impressions from MacWorld. I didn't. Shame on me. Ok, here are some... What I said earlier about Apple being a home entertainment company more than a computer company was strongly reinforced by what I saw. In fact, it seemed that about half the show floor was about iPod! The thirty-foot line of dangling iPod Shuffles for passersby to plug in their ears was very cool. There were lots of people plugged in. Hope...http://www.jroller.com/bobfoster/entry/macworld_redux |