Thursday, October 14, 1999

Tim Berners-Lee: A Vision for the Future. "The new Web must allow me to learn by crossing boundaries. It has to help me reorganize the links in my own brain so I can understand those in another person’s. It has to enable me to keep the frameworks I already have, and relate them to new ones."

XML-RPC Spec for Email: "You can use the information in this document to RPC a message to a UserLand.Com server and have it sent as an email message."

In a true community spirit, Eric Soroos posted his initial thoughts for an XML-RPC interface for mail storage.

Here's the Frontier source code for the Mail-RPC server.

Edd Dumbill is the first to support the new email spec, in PHP, both client and server. Schwinnng!

Draft of a new copyright and disclaimer page for the XML-RPC specification. It's derived from the copyright and disclaimer statement for IETF RFCs. Comments are welcome.

Salon: Surf and Sniff. "Smell-enhanced surfing: It's a concept so bizarre it just has to be a hoax. Imagine stink-bomb-scented e-mail from angry ex-lovers. Online used-car salesman who perfume their Web sites with authentic "new leather." Video games that blast you with the hot stench of alien guts. What a hoot!"

Salon asks if fart-enhanced email is coming next! I *thought* of it, but I didn't dare say it.

Just when you thought it was safe to read Scripting News, here's the farts.com joke page. (Suggestion: go to the bathroom first.)

I totally want an XML-RPC interface to this server at Ars Digita. That would be so useful, to have an always-up authority on the connection capabilities of a given server, esp if they maintained a historic database and rated servers on a scale of 1 to 10.

Brock Meeks: Web Site Holders Surrender Privacy. "When Robert Cohen set up an Internet site to sell unpopular political films he was looking for customers; now he’s afraid of the crackpots."

ZDNet UK: "For a month or so earlier this year, DoubleClick, an Internet advertising firm based in New York, furtively put up three different editions of its home page. Most visitors saw one version, highlighting the firm's accomplishments. Employees of a rival firm could see only another version, with a special press release touting DoubleClick's capture of one of the rival's customers. Clients being wooed saw only a third version."

Witness.Org advances human rights through the use of video and related communications technologies.

When I got a demo of Windows 98 from Yusuf Mehdi, a few months before it shipped, I saw that they had a command at the top of the Start menu that said "Update Windows".

Wired: When Death Goes Live. "Two great people are now in a higher place," said expedition member Kristoffer Erickson, "Their souls have entered a greater existence."