Drew's Blog : Web Technology

Reusable Components: Where The Web Standards Fall Short.

drub0y — Mon, 24 Nov 2003 19:00:00 GMT

From Scott Galloway:

Reading this post from Stephen Sharrock reminded me about something I often overlook, the phenomenally powerful DHTML behaviours which IE supports using HTC files. The WebService behaviour for instance lets you pull information into your client from aribtrary web services, even without using HTCs, tools like xLoadTree provide the ability to load data straight into the client without forcing a postback.
Before anyone comments, I know these are IE only - to be honest I don't care, when only 3% of users use anything other than IE, it seems a shame to ignore the functional improvements these kind of tools provide.
Now, Mozilla does support it's own version using XBL and XUL - hopefully some genius will work out a way for mozilla to support full HTC as well...

Scott it could be a good idea to find or to create a page with all the .htc files existing around.
[help.net]

This is one of the main reasons Microsoft needed to create a technology like XAML. It drives me nuts when people ask why they didn't just use XHTML, the DOM, etc. There's zero support for re-usable component technology in those standards! Hacking together scripts that haphazzardly add behavior to existing HTML elements is the only way to do it and man it's a mess.

IE's HTC and Mozilla's XUL/XBL are awesome component technology implementations, it's just too bad there still isn't a standard. :(

Mimeo makes extensive use of DHTML for several portions of its document building process. We invented all sorts of cross-browser component technology hacks when we started, but believe me they suck compared to HTC/XUL. We're a small team, we didn't have the resources to dedicate to “best of” experiences for NS4, IE5.x+ and Mozilla 1.x at the time, so instead we had to cater to the lowest common denominator (NS4... yuck). We're getting ready to overhaul our site and bring it into the new world though, so these are both technologies we'll be spending a lot of time investigating. More difficult today though is figuring out how to write good ASP.NET server controls which emit the proper client code by detecting the browser and ultimately receive the data generated on the client back at the server side.

Part of me just wants to write it as an Avalon smart-client, but uhh... I don't think that would pull in much business over the next 4-10 years. ;)

Update: I did a little research and found some interesting stuff. It appears the HTC spec was submitted to the w3c in 1998. At that time, all the names on the spec were from Microsoft. In 1999 it looks like it became a working draft expanded to what became known as Behavioral Extensions to CSS. This document seems to spell out the specifics of how the behaviors were attached to a particular element or set of elements and even has a Netscape developer on board. This makes me wonder why work stopped there. Sure it wasn't perfect, but... it was a start. It was supported by IE. So why didn't the Mozilla people at least provide an implementation of the working draft? I understand and agree XUL/XBL is better in plenty of ways, but... at least IE already supported HTC and we could have had some form of cross-browser component technology. :(

Tomas on Simplifying WSDL

drub0y — Thu, 05 Jun 2003 20:56:00 GMT

So let me start my own little possee here and cry: Say No to inline schema definitions in WSDL! Import is your friend....

[Commonality]

I'm with Tomas on this one. Schemas should be written as standalone documents and then be imported into the WSDL document. Not only is this easier to manage for the developer writing the schema and WSDL, but it's also easier for those who have to grok the two.

Besides, the service you're writing the WSDL for probably isn't the only thing that's going to need access to the types you define in the schemas.

Understanding SOAP

drub0y — Tue, 11 Mar 2003 00:26:00 GMT

There's a new article up over on MSDN under the XML Web Services section entitled Understanding SOAP. The author is none other than DevelopMentor XML guru Aarron Skonnard. In the article, Aarron covers SOAP from a pure XML protocol perspective; no specific client/server implementation is discussed. Next to only the specification itself, this is the best piece of reading anyone looking to learn the protocol should check out.

Don Sings The Praises of InfoPath

drub0y — Fri, 28 Feb 2003 13:52:00 GMT

... I wish I could say that the product stuff I'm working on is what blew him away, but alas, all of my mondo-cool XML and Web Service plumbing hacks were dwarfed by a little development tool that ships in just a few months.

I used that tool to write the app I'm using right now to write this blog entry. I rewrote the app for Clemens - it took about 2 minutes to take an XML Schema for my blog data to get the app fully functional. ...

[Don Box's Spoutlet]

InfoPath is definitely one product I'm looking forward to. Don reveals that InfoPath is indeed the product he's using to post to his weblog.

RE: SOAP Blogging API

drub0y — Wed, 26 Feb 2003 00:55:00 GMT

Don Box has a new weblog home . Meanwhile, it looks like he and ChrisAn are conspiring on a new SOAP based blogger API . My hope (and expectations, given that Don and I chatted on this) is that what emerges is an API that involves literally sending RSS items. Something along the lines of what I outlined in the Evolution of the Weblog APIs . [Sam Ruby]

Yeah, I mused about this once also. I even talked about it a bit on the bloggerDev list at one point, trying to stir up some thoughts on it. Unfortunately that list is pretty dead, so there wasn't much discussion going on.

FWIW, I totally agree with Sam. A SOAP based API wouldn't need to be anything too fancy and should really take a doc literal approach where the data returned pertaining to posts is based around the RSS 2.0 spec. You could embed implementation specific details into the RSS document as long as your custom elements/attributes are namespace prefixed, which should be no problem.

As far as the login parameters that are part of the current blogger API declarations, those should be factored out of the individual APIs and instead be handled as SOAP headers with the server deciding which kind of security specs it wants to support. There can of course be a simple default security spec drafted up, but more advanced implementations might want to support richer forms of security.

Doing Away With Button Images Thanks to CSS

drub0y — Tue, 25 Feb 2003 23:48:00 GMT

Dylan Greene did the button in CSS , which is precisely as politically correct as the PNG version. [Scripting News]

This is great! Surprised no one thought of this sooner.

In fact, here's a translation of the instance CSS to a class so that you can stuff it in a stylesheet and reuse it for all types of buttons in your page:

a.standardsButton { border:1px solid; border-color:#ffc8a4 #7d3302 #3f1a01 #ff9a57; padding:0px 3px 0px 3px; font:bold 10px verdana,sans-serif; color:#FFFFFF; background-color:#ff6600; text-decoration:none; margin:0px; }

Then, you can use something like so:

<a class="standardsButton" href="http://www.xmlrpc.com">XML-RPC</a>

ThreeDegrees Beta Now Available

drub0y — Mon, 24 Feb 2003 22:27:00 GMT

Following up on last week's posting, the ThreeDegrees software is now available in beta form. I just finished the product tour and am dl'ing as we speak. Looks pretty cool/fun, but I don't know if it's going to be revolutionary.

XML-RPC.NET 0.8.0 Released

drub0y — Mon, 24 Feb 2003 15:26:00 GMT

I released version 0.8.0 of XML-RPC.NET last night. It contains support for optional struct members but the FAQ documentation is... [Cook Computing]

Charles has rolled out yet another update to one of, if not the, best XML-RPC libraries for .NET. You can get all the juicy details about this release here.

If you have to work with XML-RPC based services, this is one set of components you should lock into your toolbelt.

ThreeDegrees?

drub0y — Mon, 17 Feb 2003 15:27:00 GMT

I really like the look of Microsofts new idea, threedegrees, I think they might be on to something cool. Please Microsoft, give us web services access to this and Messenger? [.NET Weblogs: Latest Posts ]

I hadn't even heard of ThreeDegrees 'til now. I agree, it sounds pretty cool. If you're interested, you can sign up to be notified when the service goes to beta.

RFC: RSS 2.0 and the MetaWeblog API

drub0y — Mon, 13 Jan 2003 16:55:00 GMT

RFC: RSS 2.0 and the MetaWeblog API

RFC: RSS 2.0 and the MetaWeblog API [Scripting News]

Ugh, holy hacking batman. The more XMLRPC gets put to the test, the more is shows just how weak it really is. It's only based on simple well-formed XML, so that's as far as it can go without hacking things like this:

If you wish to transmit an element that is part of a namespace include a sub-struct in the struct passed to newPost and editPost whose name is the URL that specifies the namespace. The sub-element(s) of the struct are the value(s) from the namespace that you wish to transmit.

Wow... nasty. :\\

This would be an absolute XML no-brainer in SOAP. Perhaps it's time to work on a SOAP based weblogging API.