Saturday, October 23, 1999

InfoWorld: Schema Skirmish between IBM and Microsoft. "Since the launch of BizTalk, IBM officials say it has become increasingly apparent that what Microsoft has in mind is a derivative of XML that is not customizable and can be accessed only through The Microsoft Network."

Look at the link list down the left edge of this page. Isn't that beautiful?? Wow.

Press release: Mirapoint stops email viruses at the router.

Two interesting links from Jorn Barger's Robot Wisdom site. First, he did a survey of people who read his site to find out how popular their weblogs are. Second, he posted a screen shot of his work environment. Nice to see Frontier (5.0.2?) running in the foreground on Jorn's Mac desktop!

In the same spirit, here's a screen shot of my desktop, as I edit Scripting News this morning and work on a DaveNet piece that will run on Tuesday.

Eatonweb is following Epinions closely.

Whim & Vinegar: "If I ran Epinions, here's what I'd do. In addition to the current model, I'd also provide a way to do quick reviews with pull down menus."

I updated my weblog on Pitas.Com. New look! (New template.)

One of my favorite sites for not promising too much. A great domain name too! (It's short for Be Nice To Bears.)

I added some pictures to UserLand's global glossary.

From Flutterby, 10/12/99: "Dave Winer has discovered why reinventing protocols is a bad idea, he's running into problems with his content distribution system built on top of XML-RPC because his protocols don't take into account a lot of the issues that SMTP and NNTP deal with effectively. This wouldn't be noteworty except that this sort of arrogance pops up fairly frequently, developers slap together something without thinking through the ramifications and it ends up biting them. I'd have thought that Dave's been in the business long enough to know this, but he seems to be remarkably short-sighted."

Pet peeve: I wish this were on a separate page on the Flutterby site so I could point to it instead of quoting it in full. I want to respond. I will do that over in the UserLand DG.

Let's take another look at the web hosting protocol. It's important that people review this. It's not a replacement for FTP, it's a new bit of functionality that reduces the complexity of content management systems, both for the developer and for the editorial team. FTP was invented before the web. A higher level protocol is necessary so that web content management can get easier and more widely deployable.