The Lair

when you bring it on yourself

(2)

Every XML document has (or is supposed to have) a DTD reference section, right at the top of the document.

<html xmlns=”http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml” …>

In the past, I’ve ranted about the necessity for these, given that I have needed to fight software libraries which fail mysteriously when no internet connectivity is present (yes, they check for the existence of the DTD. Doh).

Now the W3C system team blog complains about W3C’s excessive DTD traffic. In short, they basically gave themselves a denial of service.

These refer to HTML DTDs and namespace documents hosted on W3C’s site.

Note that these are not hyperlinks; these URIs are used for identification. This is a machine-readable way to say “this is HTML”. In particular, software does not usually need to fetch these resources, and certainly does not need to fetch the same one over and over! Yet we receive a surprisingly large number of requests for such resources: up to 130 million requests per day, with periods of sustained bandwidth usage of 350Mbps, for resources that haven’t changed in years.

The vast majority of these requests are from systems that are processing various types of markup (HTML, XML, XSLT, SVG) and in the process doing something like validating against a DTD or schema

Umm, ok. So, why do we have it as a proper addressible URL if it is never intended to be fetched?

¦October 19 2009

did you really want that glass house?

Or, things not to do with your organization’s incursion into social media.

People find out that you’re not very interesting. Or even worse, people tend to make judgments based on the content appearing in your social media profile.
Bonus points: hashtag spam on selected high value keywords. Dear god. Please stop. Now.
Once you establish that beachhead into the brave new world of Twitter, followers/fans become public information.
Social media is, or so I am told by the experts, all about the networks of connections. Mining the followers of your organizational incursion into social media gives everyone a list of kool aid drinkers that it is probably best to avoid online in most shapes and forms. Win-win all round.

Bonus points: watch a follower count pissing contest develop, as the marketing drones frantically try to astroturf support.

All in all, this is a perfect example of situational irony.

Update: It might also help if said social media site is accessible from within the corporate network. Unfortunately, this isn’t the case.

¦October 7 2009

tablogging

(1)

It’s frightfully hard to write a blog without feeling that it must do something: even the most humble blogger is encouraged to create a unique selling point, target a ‘laser-focussed niche’, embrace social media, spawn viral content, track stats, and have a dedicated marketing drive; they must teach and inspire, build ‘authority’, start a ‘conversation’, and foster a ‘community’; they should seek out a purpose, a gameplan, a revenue stream, and an exit strategy.

This socially enforced framework creates problems, not least of which in changing Web writing from an expressive, emotive celebration of free speech to an electronic stocking filler: tabloggers aren’t writing; they’re creating content — content that hopes to satisfy self-inflicted quotas, boost traffic, and burn another post on the digital altar to appease the blods. Tabloggers write from a sense of obligation; a feeling that their content must be regular and — worst of all — useful. And I’m not alone in thinking that it’s a shame:

Yet tablogs publish the ugliest kind of useful information: vacuous lists, tutorials, and recycled how-tos that try so hard to be handy as to become meaningless, soulless, voiceless and occasionally dangerous

The Rise of the TabLog

Ain’t it the truth?

¦September 24 2009

The Lair

when you bring it on yourself

(2)

did you really want that glass house?

tablogging

(1)

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