Continuing on the theme of HTML’s flaws, consider the humble BLOCKQUOTE. While long used simply to indent text, it has a recognizable semantic meaning: a long quotation from another work. A block quote may contain multiple paragraphs, so BLOCKQUOTE logically enough is a block-level element that contains other block-level elements like P. But suppose I…
I don’t much like programming language tutorials. They’re useful for getting the general sense of what a language is all about, but they inevitably elide too many crucial details to teach you how to write a real program. When I got interested in Ruby, I read the on-line version of Programming Ruby: The Pragmatic Programmer’s…
Leonard’s comment on my post about XML and footnotes got me thinking about representing footnotes in HTML. Not the visual presentation — there are lots of options for that, using CSS, JavaScript, and internal links — but the semantic one. In other words, using nothing but semantically-meaningful HTML tags (DIV, SPAN, P, A), how should…
I was at LispNYC last night listening to Anton van Straaten discuss his work on R6RS, the new Scheme standard. One surprising change from R5RS is that eval is defined in a library. Eval, in a library? Holy scopes! The Common Lispers in the audience were aghast. Even the Schemers were a tad confused. Anton…
Here’s a question that’s been bugging me for a while: what’s the best way to store information that is a mixture of highly- and loosely-structured data? For example, a collection of documents like Project Posner. Certain attributes of each document like the title, date, and citation fit easily into a normalized relational database model. But…