Web Things, by Mark Baker

It’s about time.

Web services were under attack (principled, of course) at today’s TAG call. Better late than never, I suppose…

Roy: The situation I run into is that if they don't solve the problem,
we shouldn't recommend a technology. ... WSaddressing may not be useful.

[…]

<Roy> what I said was that the WSA folks are roughly the same as the WSDL
folks and the WS* folks in general, and we have regularly described problems
with WS that need to be resolved in order to fit in with the Web, and they have
regularly refused to do so in a meaningful way. At some point, we have to say
that this technology should not be recommended to W3C members.

(emphasis mine)

[…]

<Roy> I don't find any technology that doesn't use the Web to be a useful product of the W3C.

[…]

<noah> Though, to be fair, the work required to process such a header would be a
structural change to most deployed SOAP software.
<DanC> so... the folks who made up that software dug that hole. they can dig
themselves out, no?

It’s a real shame. This would all just go away if only Web services advocates realized that the Web provides what they need for distributed, document oriented computing. You wonder why Dan, Tim, and Roy (and maybe Henry – I don’t know him very well) are pushing as they are? It’s because they understand that the Web is necessary, and that after you slash away all that makes the Web the Web, what’s left isn’t anything of any particular value to anyone, protestations to the contrary notwithstanding.

I’m not holding my breath that anything other than a toothless compromise will result from this exchange, but still, it’s nice to see the pushback; misery loves company, as they say 8-)

“the web grew by more than 17 million sites”. Now *that’s* a successful Internet scale system. Network effects don’t happen because you want them to; they happen because your architecture supports them.
(link) [del.icio.us/distobj]

Not that this isn’t widely understood, but James Robertson does a nice job at putting search context in, erm, context;

If I type HDTV in, I’ve provided no extra context – no information on whether I need a definition, or information on buying, or what have you. It’s a crap shoot. Seattle Hotels has that extra context – not only are you interested in hotels, but you are specifically interested in Hotels in Seattle. The difference between the two result sets is all about the amount of context provided.

I wonder; when a site offloads search to Google via a search form, as many do, does Google use what it knows about that site to provide context for the search?

Some playing around with the Google custom search page revealed that they may not. I first did a search for “CDF” restricted to w3.org, and the top two results were the Channel Definition Format and Compound Document Formats links, as you’d expect. But when I broadened the scope of the search to the entire Web by selecting “Search WWW”, those two were way down the list, with the second link not even on the first page. Interesting.

It seems like an obvious long-tail-ish hack, but I don’t recall hearing anybody mention it being used. But I’m hardly a search guru. Anybody know?

Update: Michael Bernstein sent me a link to what appears to be Google’s Site Flavored Search;

Site-flavored Google search delivers web search results that are customized to individual websites. Simply fill out a profile describing your website’s content, and when you add a site-flavored search box to your site, your users will get search results that are “flavored” to be more attuned to their interests.

When you go through it though, it does ask you for your site URL, then presents its analysis using some circa-1995 Yahoo directory ontology. For example, it told me my site was in the “Internet”, “Programming”, and “Software” categories. Ok, but surely PageRank’s got a lot more to say about that, no? Not with some pre-fab ontology, but in relation to other sites?

Anyhow, so you click on the “Generate HTML” button after that, and it gives you some HTML you include on your site, which includes this line;

<input type=hidden name=interests value=58|62|65>

… which seems to represent those three categories. Ok, but that seems kinda crude, no? It reminds me of del.icio.us, only centralized (their ontology), and not Web friendly (numbers instead of URIs).

So what am I missing? Why is Google doing this, and not something based on PageRank?

Stuff I Find Interesting: Enterprise SOA Priorities Go Yaron! “[…]largely ignoring WSDL and eschewing XML Schema[…]staying away from any spec that has a “WS” in front of it”
(link) [del.icio.us/distobj]

Exactly right. Yet another tightly-coupled aspect of the Web services architecture. *sigh*
(link) [del.icio.us/distobj]

Jon has a knack for putting into words what I’ve tried to say before about UDDI, and indeed the superior composability of Web-friendly services over Web services.

That’s the name of the latest operation added to the Google Adwords API. Yes, it does what you’d expect with that name; it returns an http URI upon which you invoke GET to get your compressed report.

What a totally bizarre hybrid of RPC and hypermedia. Wow.

Come on Google, you’re supposed to be leading the charge. Right? Then sh*t or get off the pot, as they say.

Sandro gets it; “I’m in the slightly odd position of co-authoring the tag URI spec[..], and yet I think most applications of tag URIs would be better off using HTTP URIs”
(link) [del.icio.us/distobj]

A small group of us just wrapped up a ScheduledTopicChat on the topic of the relationship between RDF Forms and the SPARQL protocol, as it relates to an issue I raised with the DAWG WG. Here’s the chat description and discussion.

The end result is that Dan Connolly (DAWG chair) now gets what I’m talking about and realizes the advantages. The downside is that the impact of the required change would likely be too great at this time, so will have to be introduced later. Still, it’s nice to finely get an esoteric point of Web architecture across to someone; doubly nice too, that it was to one of my heroes of the Web.

Cool. Ning is to social, as Jot is to enterprise
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