Sometimes I think of collaborative development as a game of ping pong. I pick up a paddle, and my partner picks one up too. He hits the ball over the net. I hit it back. Ping. Pong. Back and forth.  

Joe Hewitt and I have been talking on and off for about five years. There's a pretty big age difference, I'm a generation older -- but there's a lot of similarity in thinking. Except in politics. Joe is a frequent commenter here, and most of his comments make me wish he'd start his own blog. I've asked many times.  

Now he has started his own blog. If you read Scripting News you should also be reading Joe's blog.  

Joe is an accomplished developer. He and Blake Ross got Firefox started. And he did the iPhone app for Facebook.  

In his latest piece, he takes the web apart, and claims we can rebuild it without HTML. Of course I agree. I've been working on RSS and OPML for a long time. These are very much web-able technologies, though it might not be so clear about RSS. Want a demo? Do a view-source on my RSS feed and see the links to the OPML source for each blog post. That's not HTML. You could do a whole browsing experience for Scripting News without touching a single HTML file. I've been wanting Joe and others to take a look at that for a while. I think maybe now they will. One can hope!  

And I have a new format that I think of as Rivers of JSON. You can have a peek at it by doing a view-source on one of the HTML rivers that my River2 software publishes. You won't see any data in there. The HTML is just a way of browsing the data behind it which is all JSON. You can think of the format as a super-RSS in JSON. It's got the content of many RSS feeds in it. But the elements would be familiar to anyone with experience working with RSS. 

There's an example of what Joe is talking about. No surprise that the ideas interlock, because we've been doing verbal ping pong for a few years. My work is pretty far along. And he got me to roll up my sleeves and bake JSON into my world. So it's all sitting there waiting for him to take up a software ping pong paddle and hit the ball back over the net.