Greg K Nicholson - Mooquackwooftweetmeow 4 Weblog

Don't hash those numbers!

2004-06-21T21:30:00+01:00

I just remembered XHTML ids aren't allowed to begin with numbers, so it's probably not a good idea to give weblog entries permalinks like mine.

Never mind - they'll all be breaking soon anyway (I know - Atom sacrilege, but until URNs work better it's sometimes gonna be unavoidable).

Hash those hs!

2004-06-21T13:55:00+01:00

A quick request of everyone who writes web pages, especially weblogs, or who designs web page templates:

Give every heading an id, so that other folks (and you) can link to sections of an article or entry.

It's not quite Purple Numbers but it does the job more than effectively (and it's not half as overkilly). I reckon it's fair to assume that if someone wants to link to a part of your page in another page, they'll have the ability to view your page's source and find the ids. And if they can't, purple numbers would probably befuddle them anyway.

I do it automatically - it really takes little effort. Another point is to use proper titles, not #title4, so that if you add a chunk, nothing will break (and referring urls look much friendlier).

Watch out - here comes the “link to other weblogs” trick!

2004-06-07T19:10:00+01:00

Redesigns, anyone? Looks like fun.

The Twaddlebot has been unleashed

2004-06-07T18:40:00+01:00

Last night version 1.0 of The Twaddle went live. It uses arbitrary XML and XSLT to generate valid XHTML pages... offline.

The idea of uploading bare-bones articles and an XSLT template, allowing the browser to generate pages as they're required, was a no-go. But I managed to rig up the transformation offline, to be run as a batch.

Following the tradition of giving XML languages names that are barely-logical acronyms beginning with X, I call the language XTw, which stands for XML... Twaddle... something.

Here's how I worked the magic (borrowing liberally from a newsgroup posting I made on the subject):

This assumes: no programming experience, but enough computer savvy to create XML and XSL files to need transforming in the first place; and a Windows (XP) machine)

First off, you'll need Xalan, available from http://xml.apache.org/xalan-j/ (and the requisite Java runtime, which you probably already have)

The actual file I downloaded was http://apache.rmplc.co.uk/dist/xml/xalan-j/xalan-j-current-bin.tar.gz

There's also http://apache.rmplc.co.uk/dist/xml/xalan-j/xalan-j-current-bin.zip if you prefer a zip.

The version I got was 2.6.0 (the Java version).

Unzip Xalan into a folder. I used C:\Program Files\xalan-j_2_6_0

Now the code from http://evc-cit.info/cit041x/batchfiles.html#transform:

echo off java -cp h:\java\xmljar\xalan-j_2_5_1\bin\xml-apis.jar;h:\java\xmljar\xalan-j_2_5_1\bin\xercesImpl.jar;h:\java\xmljar\xalan-j_2_5_1\bin\xalan.jar;. org.apache.xalan.xslt.Process -IN %1 -XSL %2 -OUT %3 %4 %5 %6 %7 %8 %9

The only line break should be after echo off.

Copy this into a plain text editor (e.g. Notepad), and save it as filename.bat (I used ANSI encoding, if it matters)

You should now have an MS-DOS Batch File.

(Apparently some versions of Notepad append .txt to filenames, even if they contain a file extension. In these cases, quoting the filename - e.g. “filename.bat” - allegedly solves the problem)

You'll most likely have to modify the code to point to the actual locations of your Xalan installation and files.

I only plan on using one XSL stylesheet with multiple files; the input files will be filename.xml. The output files will be filename.htm and will be kept in the folder above the one where the input and XSL files are kept. So, I modified the code a little:

java -cp "c:\program files\xalan-j_2_6_0\bin\xml-apis.jar";"c:\program files\xalan-j_2_6_0\bin\xercesImpl.jar";"c:\program files\xalan-j_2_6_0\bin\xalan.jar";. org.apache.xalan.xslt.Process -IN %1.xml -XSL "c:\path\to\an\xsl\file\xsl.xml" -OUT ..\%1.htm

This should all be on one line. %1 in the code will be replaced by the first argument passed to the batch file, %2 by the second argument, etc. ..\ means up one folder. The quotation marks around the filenames cause them to be treated as one item, despite their containing spaces.

You can add @echo off (without quotes) in an empty line above, if you prefer not to have masses of textual output in the command console. e.g.:

@echo off java -cp "c:\...

echo off turns off the display of subsequent commands; @ hides the echo off command.

To perform the transformation, open a command console (Start > Run > "cmd") and navigate to the location of your XML, XSL and batch files, by typing

cd "c:\path\to\files"

(including the quotes)

For simplicity's sake, I've shoved everything in the same folder, and used absolute paths for the programs. You could probably also mess around with relative paths or the path environment variable, but I can't be bothered.

I ended up having to use HTML Tidy to contort the output into valid XHTML. My final batch file reads:

java -cp "c:\program files\xalan-j_2_6_0\bin\xml-apis.jar";"c:\program files\xalan-j_2_6_0\bin\xercesImpl.jar";"c:\program files\xalan-j_2_6_0\bin\xalan.jar";. org.apache.xalan.xslt.Process -IN %1.xtw -XSL "XTw2XHTML.xsl" -OUT ..\thetwaddle\%1.htm "C:\Program Files\HTMLTidy\tidy.exe" -q -m -c --show-warnings no --output-xml yes --output-xhtml yes -latin1 --doctype strict --tidy-mark no --wrap 0 --ascii-chars no --drop-proprietary-attributes yes --fix-bad-comments no ..\thetwaddle\%1.htm echo Done %1.

(Line breaks have been doubled for clarity.)

The input XML files are all labelled filename.xtw; the XSL stylesheet is XTw2XHTML.xsl, and the output files are cacked into the folder thetwaddle, a sibling of the folder where the batch file lives, and assigned a suffix of .htm.

Those options shown for Tidy are the result of trial and error, or rather, trial and testing and reading Tidy's Quick Reference - no warranty implied. The echo command prints out a message for each finished file.

This batch file is wrapped up in another one, which repeatedly calls the first, thus:

@echo off echo Transforming XTw into XHTML... call xtw2xhtml afile call xtw2xhtml otherfiles echo Done.

The text output is just to make the command console more interesting while the batch program is running. It also helps pinpoint any errors, such as typos, which show up as blobs of text in the command console.

The result of all this fiddling is that I can change pages' contents more easily; I've been able to, fairly easily, implement a few minor changes that would have taken effort before. The final product lives here.

In semi-related news, it turns out that PURLs such as purl.org/mooquackwooftweetmeow, without the trailing slash, are possible - it's just partial redirects that have to end with slashes. The Twaddle's now on PURLs, too - purl.org/thetwaddle - with or without the slash.

While uploading Unleash The Twaddlebot! (The Twaddle v1.0), I was reminded that we're approaching the 50-file limit; that's not including styles, which are kept in a separate account. This means we'll probably have to change hosts.

Fortunately, ntl provide 55 megabytes of space, so I'm planning to shift everything there. This shouldn't be too troublesome now that everything's on PURLs.

I've actually just finished the last post...

2004-04-27T18:25:00+01:00

Aren't foreign websites funny? slaap lekker!

(By the way, I have no idea what any of those words mean... except perhaps Internet)

Adventures in XML

2004-04-27T17:40:00+01:00

I did manage to get the XML+XSL-based jiggery-pokery for The Twaddle working - quite nicely, actually. Getting the entire contents of the content field onto the page took a little bit of effort, as described on the mozillaZine forums.

I won't be implementing this on The Twaddle, though - for a start, Opera and KHTML don't like XSLT. And it's not half as accessible for non-standard browsers (relics, mobile devices, text browsers...) as plain, extraneous-menu-items-and-such-written-into-the-article XHTML is. Nonetheless, a working example is online for the time being.

Update: the real thing's gone live... sort of... so the prototype has been removed. Additional related blurb is contained in a later entry in this weblog.

There's a slight chance that I might implement an XML-driven article system on Mooquackwooftweetmeow, where I'm not too fussed about old and/or buggy browsers. The fact that mobile devices won't render the page is more of a concern.

Perhaps some way of pulling in external XHTML fragments could be handled in CSS3? Then again, why duplicate XSL functionality in CSS - small devices' browsers could just be taught to handle XSL.

One more Twaddle-related thing: thanks to Internet Explorer conditional comments (on which MSDN has an hilarious article), I'm now feeding IE users some nice propaganda in the foot of the front page:

You're using Internet Explorer?! You do realise that it's years out-of-date, and screws up most modern web pages, don't you? In fact it's screwing this one up right now and you don't even know it. Try a proper web browser instead.

Oh, and another tiny little piece of The Twaddle-related trivia: the version number on the front page is now in the title text of the copyright notice - it's tidier and it leaves room for a pointless codename.

Over to the Mooquackwooftweetmeow Weblog now, where, thanks to our old friend XML namespaces, and our newer friend the XSL copy-of element, proper links are now in use. I've gone back through the weblog and updated plain text URLs to be links. The more observant of you will have noticed that there have been a smattering of links throughout this post - that'll be the norm from now on.

The even more observant of you will have noticed line breaks as well. I'd use paragraphs but the XSL stylesheet inserts the content into a paragraph - I don't think the XHTML validator would like paragraphs within paragraphs (not that it'd like this Atom file at all...). And I don't think the site's CSS would like divs to hold the text, in place of paragraphs; it might - I just haven't looked at mqwtm's CSS in ages so I can't remember. Besides, line breaks are lighter on the markup than open-and-close <xhtml:p> tags.

And in a final twist of XMLish loveliness, I've chucked a few XHTML <code> tags in as well.

</epic>

Opera + XSL = Eugh

2004-04-23T14:16:00+01:00

Evidently Opera doesn't like XSL - this weblog shows up as a lot of plain text with the odd URL chucked in. The question is whether I care.

The Twaddle is more of a public offering than this weblog, so it matters a little more if it's inaccessible using Opera... but then how many readers of The Twaddle use Opera? I'd say few to none. (Checking the site stats for The Twaddle will probably show a few Opera hits - most of which are me).

IE + XML + XSL + XHTML + W3C = Get In!

2004-04-23T14:07:00+01:00

As a prelude to some major back-end renovation I'm planning for The Twaddle, I decided to see if I could get Internet Explorer 6 to display this XSL-ified weblog nicely, not accounting for IE-unsupported CSS (which is already taken care of at The Twaddle). Previously, IE displayed the DOCTYPE declaration as plain text at the top of the page; using strategic HTML commenting, I've managed to prevent it from doing so.

Actually, I bet simply removing the DOCTYPE declaration wouldn't affect either Gecko or IE's rendering of the page, as I think XML kicks both of them into standards mode anyway.

The next step is to try this with some of The Twaddle. And I'd probably best check Opera's effort, too.

Wow - two entries in ten minutes - you'd think this was a weblog or something

2004-04-23T02:25:00+01:00

This sort of thing should be better publicised. (By the way, I think that's his serious face.)

Hurrah for Ridiculous Quotes!

2004-04-23T02:12:00+01:00

While perusing this weblog at this ridiculous hour, I happened to follow my (text) link to the April Fools' Day thread on The Twaddle Forums, whereupon (oh, yeah!) I saw this most ridiculous quote from my cousin, who likes to call himself bob:

so far 197 posts have been affected by the_word kangaroo

- underscore and all. I think this calls for a colon-dee :D

And while making this post, I remembered that Britain is now on BST, so my last couple of posts may have actually been an hour earlier than they say (this one's about right). I shan't change them for I haven't the arsibility.

And finally, drop by The Twaddle over the next couple of days - it's been St.-George'sed.

Apostrophes

2004-03-15T16:10:00+00:00

I'm now using the aforementioned RSS Reader to read this weblog. So it has to be valid Atom, the content must validate when RSSified, and still validate when XHTMLified. Thus, to save hassle relating to escape characters and other such technicalities, I'm now using straight apostrophes as quotes. It's ugly, but it works.

Update: with the advent of the Mooquackwhatnotbot I'm now using proper HTML quotes - <q> and </q>. The usual disclaimer about Internet Explorer's crapness applies, as does one about Atom feed readers - they probably won't show any quotes.

The Twaddle is now printastic, and other web-authoring-related digressions

2004-03-08T19:30:00+00:00

A while ago I added a print stylesheet to Mooquackwooftweetmeow; now, The Twaddle's had the same treatment. On Saturday I also gave The Twaddle a site icon, so the site's now approaching Mooquackwooftweetmeow in completeness. Does this mean v1.0 any time soon? Probably not...maybe.

I've been meaning to overhaul Mooquackwooftweetmeow's underlying XHTML/CSS for a while, mainly due to unnecessary over-id-ing in anticipation of some sort of use in future. My approach to The Twaddle was exactly the reverse - things were added in as and when needed. The Twaddle went from idea to reality in two days, and from blank files to website in one evening, so I didn't really have time to consider what id-s might come in handy later.

The Twaddle was initially based around some content - the website only existed to purvey the content. By contrast, Mooquackwooftweetmeow has only ever existed for the hell of it. The approach taken with The Twaddle seems to have worked better. Mooquackwooftweetmeow seems perhaps over-designed now; the Georgia font probably didn't help as it prompted the small-caps for the UTC at the foot of each item; this is titled with Co-ordinated Universal Time... all of which seems rather over-elaborate.

Another source of much annoyance is the fact that the menu items aren't centred; I might have another bash at centring them nicely...

RSSification

2004-02-24T19:20:00+00:00

2RSS (http://www.2rss.com/) has a nice converteriser which outputs any Atom feed (such as this one - wink, wink) as RSS, available at http://www.2rss.com/software.php?page=atom2rss So now even if your newsreader isn't Atom-enabled you can still read this weblog; now you've got no excuse.

Mooquackwooftweetmeow's Going Nowhere

2004-02-20T23:00:00+00:00

I now have my own PURL top-level domain. What in the heck is a PURL top-level domain? PURL stands for Persistant Uniform Resource Locator - an URL is just a normal web address. A PURL is simply a redirect, designed so that it persists indefinitely; I can change what purl.org/mooquackwooftweetmeow/ points to, but the PURL itself never changes. This means that if I ever move to another webhost (which I don't expect to happen very soon), I can point purl.org/mooquackwooftweetmeow/ there instead. This weblog can be found at http://purl.org/mooquackwooftweetmeow/weblog, but unfortunately KlipFolio doesn't understand HTTP redirects. Bugger.

Nonetheless, if and when - :) - you link to Mooquackwooftweetmeow, use http://purl.org/mooquackwooftweetmeow/ for the main site, and http://purl.org/mooquackwooftweetmeow/weblog for this weblog (note the distribution of slashes). Now that I've got my own PURL, I've changed the Atom feed so that the items are IDed using PURLs; items' IDs are never suppose to change, so PURLs are perfect for that. This means you may get duplicate items in this feed now (and only the once), but you never will later.

Update: Yeah, well - I can't always be right. The appropriate URL to link to this weblog is now http://gkn.me.uk/ for the web page, and http://gkn.me.uk/atom for the Atom feed.

Klipfolio + Atom = 1/2

2004-02-20T19:20:00+00:00

OK, I can't embed an Atom feed in a Klip, but you can view Atom feeds using Klipfolio. Its Feed Reader Klip (http://www.klipfarm.com/farm.php?page=info&klip=916) accepts Atom as well as RSS 2.0 and RDF (RSS 1.0).

Isn't XML wonderful?

2004-02-20T19:15:00+00:00

Despite an hour of valiant effort, I've been unable to convince Gecko to render XHTML embedded in an Atom feed. I've tried encoding the arrow brackets, various namespace trickery... to no avail. So you're gonna have to put up with plain text URLs, until someone can show me how it's done... anybody?

Namespaces are fairly fun

2004-02-19T18:30:00+00:00

The Feed Validator (http://feedvalidator.org) gave me a thumbs-down :( Entries' IDs have to be valid URLs, you see, and I'd been using them as arbitrary labels. I'd also been leeching off these arbitrary labels in order to create anchors in the XHTML representation of the feed; those using a web browser can check they work by clicking this item's title; those using a news aggregator can visit the alternate link; in both cases, the item's title should be at the very top of the browser window.

I managed to circumvent Atom's rigidity using XML's flexibility - I invented a new arbitrary label for each item - label, under my own namespace; I now have everything working as before, plus a valid feed. Glory!

I think I'll go and play a bit of pool now...

Wow! Internet Explorer can even mangle XML!

2004-02-19T16:15:00+00:00

Here's me thinking Internet Explorer wouldn't display this feed properly! Obviously, it doesn't... but it at least has a go at mangling it, leaving this text (and this) legible. You do get a nice piece of HTML above the title, however.

So, then - Hello! to all you fools reading this in Internet Explorer! Do yourself a favour and fetch a web browser (http://www.mozilla.org/products/firefox/).

Actually, on the topic of plain text links and Mozilla Firefox, I've now reinstalled the text/plain extension for Firefox (http://extensionroom.mozdev.org/more-info/textplain), so I can now select plain text links, right-click 'em, and do stuff. I suggest you also install it; it'll come in handy for this log.

Freewebs aren't very good at MIME types... part II

2004-02-19T15:40:00+00:00

Sorta got side-tracked there... Anyway, to get around the incorrect MIME type problem (which made Gecko refuse to play ball), I've tagged .xml onto the end of the weblog's files; hopefully that'll satisfy most browsers.

Freewebs aren't very good at MIME types

2004-02-19T15:30:00+00:00

Freewebs is obviously designed to cater for webmasters who've never heard of Jeffrey Zeldman... Like most, if not all, free web hosts, Freewebs use filename extensions to determine what MIME type to serve for a file; this is OK, until they get it wrong. Granted, Atom and XSL aren't the most commonly used file formats on the web but nonetheless Freewebs could bother serving them with the proper MIME types.

A few months ago, I asked them if they could serve .xhtml files as XHTML rather than plain text. They responded by saying they wanted to comply with web standards; could I please send them the reference to the W3C recommendation. Great! ...except that nothing's happened since (or at least they haven't told me about it if anything has) - a couple of weeks ago I checked and .xhtml files were still being served as plain text.

I'd appeal to Freewebs now, except I suspect they use Internet Explorer, and thus won't be able to read this...

Klipfolio + Atom = 0

2004-02-19T15:25:00+00:00

Well! It seems that one can't (easily) use an atom feed as klipfood :/ By easily I mean I can't just point it towards the URL and have it automagically work, like it does for RSS. Eh, well... I'm gonna hold the klip back until I can get it assimilating this feed; at the moment it's just a rehash of the RSS feed, intermingled with The Twaddle's RSS feed.

Copy and paste...

2004-02-19T14:30:00+00:00

By the way, those URLs in the previous post are just plain text; unless your browser parses plain text URLs, you're just gonna have to copy and paste them for now - I'm not an XML expert and the prospect of digging about trying to force Atom and XHTML to work together to produce links, isn't appealing... maybe later.

Hurrah once more!

2004-02-19T14:20:00+00:00

That w3schools (http://www.w3schools.com/) is pretty decent. I've now concocted an XSL stylesheet for this feed, so visiting its URL in a (good) web browser should display it as a nice page.

I managed to cajole XML namespaces into doing what I want with a little help from a random blog entry (http://today.icantfocus.com/blog/archives/entries/000430/) by Christopher H. Laco, and his one-size-fits-all feed stylesheet. Those who are interested can have a gander at my resulting stylesheet (http://purl.org/mooquackwooftweetmeow/weblog.xsl.xml).

Next job: rig up a klip.

Hurrah!

2004-02-19T13:00:00+00:00

Well, then... this is an atom weblog. Why's it only in atom format? Everything on Mooquackwooftweetmeow is done the old-fashioned way - using the human brain, a plain-text editor, and no PHP, ASP, SQL or any other fanciness. And I don't want to have to copy every entry out into an XHTML page. I'm thinking of having a bash at some XSLT, to automatically generate a fancy front for the weblog; I tried it with the RSS feed, but didn't quite manage it satisfactorily; perhaps my standards are just too high (after all, I am using a free web host).

Greg K Nicholson - Moo­quack­woof­tweet­meow 4 Weblog