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vCard: Your Electronic Business Card







vCard automates the exchange of personal information typically found on a
traditional business card. vCard is used in applications such as Internet
mail, voice mail, Web browsers, telephony applications, call centers, video
conferencing, PIMs (Personal Information Managers), PDAs (Personal Data
Assistants), pagers, fax, office equipment, and smart cards. vCard
information goes way beyond simple text, and includes elements like
pictures, company logos, live Web addresses, and so on.






vCard version 3 is defined in two parts:




• RFC 2425,
  MIME Content-Type for Directory Information
  
• RFC 2426,
  vCard MIME Directory Profile
  

IMC hopes that all vCard developers
take advantage of these new open standards and make their software
compatible with both vCard v2.1 and vCard v3.0.




• An overview of vCard
  
• vCard White Paper
  
• Specifications and other materials
  for product developers
  
• A non-IMC extension to vCard for
  pronunciation and sorting
  



There is a microformat, "hCard", that enables (X)HTML to be
marked up, using just a set of class-names, so that vCards can
be extracted from it. See
the hcard site for more information.

Radio buttons

File select controls

Select boxes, multiple

Single line text inputs

Multi-line text inputs

Checkboxes

All Mac browsers were running on Mac OS X 10.3.5, and all Windows browsers were tested in Windows 2000 and Windows XP. By default, this is what the various controls look like in each of the tested browsers:

Buttons

Submit buttons

The problems with frames




The drawbacks are obvious to some, while others think frames have some things going for them. The problems I see with frames are mostly related to usability and accessibility. You may have heard of the problems before, but let me reiterate:





• Frames break the unified model of the web. One of the basic principles of the web is that every page is represented by a unique URL – the page is the atomic unit of information. Frames break this fundamental principle.



• Frames cause problems for search engine robots. While it is possible to provide workarounds that allow search engine robots to crawl a frame based website, those workarounds are still workarounds. There will also be problems for visitors that come to a framed site from a search engine. Those visitors are likely to land on documents that are incomplete when viewed outside of the context of the frameset they belong to. Crucial elements like navigational links may be missing, for example.

  
  

  Some frame-dependant websites try to get around these problems by using the file robots.txt to tell search engines not to index sub pages. On other sites, JavaScript is used to prevent visitors from viewing any document outside of its parent frameset. Both of these methods – preventing deep-linking and disallowing search engines from indexing a site – may work, if the goal is to get fewer visitors.



• Frames make URLs stop working. If a visitor wants to send someone the URL of a document within a frame based site, they can’t just copy the address from the browser’s navigation or location field. That’s the frameset’s URL, not that of the current document. It’s possible to extract the URL to a document within a frameset, but many people don’t know how to do that. Even if you do manage to find the document’s URL, it leads to an incomplete page, creating the same problem as when a search engine indexes a frame based site.


• Frames break bookmarking. Most web browsers can’t bookmark a page inside a frame based website. When you open the bookmark, you will go to the default state of the frameset, which is usually the website’s homepage, and most probably not the page you intended to bookmark.


• Frames make printing more difficult. Many visitors will have problems when trying to print documents. It’s common for browsers to require that you activate a frame by clicking in it (or tabbing to it) before you can print it.


• Frames hurt accessibility. While the leading screen readers can handle frames, a frame based site is more complex, and thus more difficult to navigate in a non-graphical browser. For this reason, accessibility guidelines advise against using frames.


• Frames increase technical complexity. Besides causing trouble for the site’s visitors, developers using frames make things harder on themselves. A frame based website is technically more complex, and more time consuming to develop and maintain than a site that doesn’t use frames. For example, something as simple as keeping the navigation system in sync with what’s being displayed in the main content area can get really complicated.






Iframes




What about iframes (inline frames) then? Well, usability-wise they really aren’t all that different from normal frames. They suffer from most of the problems mentioned for normal frames. Iframes are probably slightly less complex to maintain than normal frames since they don’t need special frameset files.




There are also reports of potential accessibility problems with iframes, where under some circumstances an iframe grabs focus when its content has finished loading. This can be very confusing for someone using a screen reader, and can cause unexpected results when printing. I haven’t seen this occur in my (limited) testing, but it’s something to keep an eye on.





CSS based frame imitations

Browsers 2.0: Interview with Flock co-founder Geoffrey Arone

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Learn to Spell

This one is essential. If you're on instant messenger, it's almost guaranteed that the terrible net-speak lingo has infiltrated your way of writing. U prolly talk like dis. BAD! It's best to get rid of that nasty habit as soon as you can. But it saves you time? A terrible excuse. Using correct grammar and spelling is of utmost importance. Also, avoid acronyms like LMAO and ttyl. They really make you sound…your age. The occasional gtg is probably acceptable though. Proper usage will impress your clients, friends, and parents. I went through this same transformation, and I can't tell you how beneficial it was. Knowing that your client thinks you're in your thirties is such a fun feeling.

Web Standards or Die

If you're just starting out - you're in a good position. You can completely bypass all that garbage HTML with spacer gifs, tables for layout, etc., and get straight to the good stuff. But chances are you've already got some bad foundations you've acquired. They could be from Front page and its ilk (yes, Dreamweaver is no good either), they could be from some ancient HTML book you own, or they could be from MySpace. Wherever they're from, forget them ASAP! Web Standards are the most important step of morphing from a little script kiddy to a serious developer. If you don't think they are important, let me tell you: You'll get nowhere without them. Your progress and skill level as a web developer will remain in a stand-still. The first few months of learning web standards are the toughest - moving from those oh-so-comfortable <tables> to CSS and XHTML is by no means easy. But every one who has made the transition to the other side will tell you - they'd never go back.

Don't get bitter about IE

Every new web developer catches the strangle-internet-explorer's-developers bug. I had it for a solid year or so. Explorer is the bane of every fledgling web designer's existence. It can have you in tears at your keyboard for days at a time. And you think it will never pass - but it will. Over time, as your experience increases, your hatred of IE will fade. The thing is, as you learn what ties Explorer in knots, you also learn how to avoid it. And then next time you have to accomplish a similar effect, you'll be ready. I've been incredibly surprised at how little trouble IE has caused me with my latest projects. Not to say it hasn't had its quirks, but because of all my prior experience, I've been able to sidestep areas where IE will certainly have trouble. Don't take extreme measures to punish IE users. Telling them that they suck isn't going to win you any friends! You have to accept that IE is a staple of the internet and it won't simply go away. Convert all your friends and family to firefox, get an FF t-shirt, but don't hate the ignorance of IE users.

CSS is probably the toughest area in which IE struggles. You'll just have to persevere and keep your eyes on the goal. Also, be inventive. If something's not working, don't spend too much time trying to figure out why. You have to accept that IE is twisted to the core and it will never make complete sense. Move on to a new method of solving your problem. Having a complete knowledge of CSS is essential - and it will come with experience. But remember to have hope - IE 7 is up and coming, and it looks to be a nice dose of relief.

dedicate some cycles to designing an OPML icon for use on the site:

Before you ask, I did float this past Dave

This is an interesting area of law. Eric Goldman has an rundown of the issues.

In my mind, there's no question that a blogger grants an implied license to the content in an RSS feed. However, because it's implied, I'm just not sure of the license terms. So, in theory, it could be an implied license to permit aggregators to do whatever they want.

...

It is trivial to destroy an implied license, so bloggers can overcome any aggregator use simply by saying so. I'm not sure WHERE the blogger would need to say this (by the "syndicate" link? in the xml feed itself?). Perhaps any disclosure in any reasonable place would be sufficient to destroy the implied license.

So it would seem that Tobias has reasonably withdrawn his implicit license by placing the notice in the feed itself, as a post. The question of where a reasonable place to put such a notice is important. Since one can subscribe to an RSS feed without ever visiting the parent site, I think perhaps the only reasonable place for a terms of service for a feed is within the feed itself. Snow vs. DirectTV suggests that a warning isn't necessarily enough to overcome an implicit license. Of course, I am not a lawyer so my interpretation may be flawed.

Figure 5: The Golden Triangle - Eye Tracking on Google Results

Source: Hotchkiss 2005

Note: These two heatmaps are scaled to match vertically at 800 pixels in height.

But why are enterprise mashups important?

I've had discussions with a number of enterprise architects currently working in the industry about this and I do see a common theme in many of the IT requests they get these days.  There seems to be considerable pent-up demand for smaller, custom applications in large numbers.  The solution space around large enterprise apps is increasingly well-bounded; almost all enterprises today already have their mainline IT systems well developed and evolved.  The remaining IT projects are often the ones in which the investment for traditional tools and processes would not justify the return.  And based on these anecdotal discussions, there seems to be a sort of Long Tail of IT software demand, something both Rod Boothby and I have been discussing this year.  If true, it is just possible that there is a vast amount of untapped value left in IT yet.  We just need tools to access it.

The main attraction of mashups is that they have the potential for self-service in that end-users can theoretically create them.  They also perform integration in the browser.  This provides a sort of safe "sandbox" where users can experiment safely with powerful tools without affecting the traditional IT development, deployment, and support processes.   And presumably, enterprise mashups tools would provide automatic versioning, security, and other needed enterprise software qualities. 

Documents may be extractable by our technical documents database and possibly from different document management systems residing on the Intranet. The Gray boxes represent descriptions of relationships people will have to indicate in the system for it to be public. This is the typical "profile" data people enter on social networking systems. The Orange boxes represent the more ambiguous or possibly appropriate areas and are the focus of my present concern.

Discussion group and usenet postings are also an area that I have concern about being

Dogear: An Example of REST

REST specifies that a given resource be represented
by a stable URI (uniform resource identifier), such that the same URI will
mean the same thing over time. This implies that the current state of an
application must depend entirely on the URI, and not on opaque, hidden conditions
such as cookies. The dogear application state consists of a set of constraints
on which bookmarks are currently visible, an output format, a current page
number, and the number of links per page.

Output Format

The first element of a dogear URL path selects the desired
output format. Currently implemented formats include:

* /html—the Web site itself
* /rss—RSS 2.02
* /atom—Atom 1.03
* js—a JavaScript snippet, which, when evaluated, causes HTML to be emitted on the including page
* /xbel—the XML Bookmark Exchange Language4 

Each of the machine-readable formats is extended, via XML namespaces, to
include dogear-specific meta-data.

Programmatic read/write access to one’s own bookmarks is provided by
an HTTP API, which resides at /api. Bookmarks are created and modified via
HTTP POST using simple name=value query parameters to provide bookmark title,
URL, and tags. Bookmarks may be deleted by calling /api?url=url with HTTP
DELETE.

With all of the recent news about top Digg users being offered cash by Netscape to move over to their competing platform, I’m not surprised to see that someone has apparently placed their top 100 Digg profile up for sale on eBay.

The auction, which started a few hours ago, is for the Digg username GeekForLife. The user has submitted 748 Digg stories, 39 of which have made it to the Digg home page. There are no bidders as of 4 pm PST on Sunday.