Web Things, by Mark Baker

Dims and Mark hack an API
(link) [del.icio.us/distobj]

Some musings of mine on OpenDoc and W3C CDF
(link) [del.icio.us/distobj]

I’d forgotten about this excellent piece by Paul Prescod.
(link) [del.icio.us/distobj]

Some REST push-back. Seems more a complaint of Flickr’s API than REST itself though.
(link) [del.icio.us/distobj]

Three years and two months between drafts; a new record?
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“The number one reason people begin blogging is to establish themselves as a visible authority in their field” Huh. That’s why I do it, but I would have thought that reason to be well down the list.
(link) [del.icio.us/distobj]

The more that two parties agree upon, the more that can be accomplished between them without additional coordination.

Additional coordination is expensive. It not uncommonly requires years of standardization and years more to deploy the new software to support it. Therefore, if we can leverage existing deployed agreement, that’s always best…

If two parties agree to communicate via TCP/IP, on some specific port, ad-hoc integration capabilities are limited to sending and receiving bits reliably between two points. Want to exchange data? Want to invoke a method? Sorry, additional agreement is required.

If two parties agree to communicate via the common use of SOAP-over-HTTP, ad-hoc integration capabilities are limited to remote method invocation with standardized faults in response. Want to invoke a method? No problem! Want to exchange data? Sorry, that requires additional agreement on a set of methods that facilitate data exchange.

If two parties agree to communicate via HTTP (or other transfer protocols), ad-hoc integration capabilities include data exchange.

… and so on, and so on, up the stack.

I’ve found that placing new technologies in the context of this coordination-centric view of the world as an excellent litmus test for the potential success of those technologies.

It also helps me to evaluate some design choices in large scale systems where an existing system is being “reused”. For instance, I consider the Web services notion of “protocol independence” to be prima facie a bad idea because it knocks us down a notch in terms of what can be coordinated a priori; whereas without tunneling we can use HTTP for data exchange, with tunneling we can only use it for method invocation.

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.
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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?