Jeni's Musings

In my last post I discussed the kinds of situations where overlapping markup can appear in documents, and the distinction between containment, when one element happens to contain another, and dominance, where the relationship between the two elements is more meaningful. Here I’ll expand a bit more on the issue of whether dominance relationships are or should be part of the essential information in the document.

I’ve spent the last few days at a workshop on overlapping markup in Amsterdam. It was organised by Claus Huitfeldt and Michael Sperberg-McQueen under a GODDAG banner, but included representatives of other approaches, such as the XCONCUR crowd and the LMNListas Wendell and myself.

Earlier this week I presented at SWIG-UK about rdfQuery. rdfQuery is a set of plugins that I’ve developed for jQuery in order to support RDFa parsing, querying and generation. There are a bunch of other Javascript libraries for RDFa around, such as Mark Birbeck’s Ubiquity RDFa and Ben Adida’s RDFa library. What I’ve really tried to do with rdfQuery is tie it in with the “Write Less, Do More” philosophy of jQuery and provide a neat, elegant API. At least that’s the aim!

I haven’t been posting here very much of late because my XML-related posts (which tends to be most of them) have been going on xml.com. When I joined xml.com, the promise was more exposure with a wider audience. Then they changed the blogging system, and changed it again, and by now I’m not sure if there’s any audience at all!

However O’Reilly have, finally, provided author-based Atom feeds. So if you want to subscribe to my future xml.com posts, the crucial URL is feed://broadcast.oreilly.com/jeni-tennison/atom.xml. If you want to see my previous posts, they can be found under the “blog” tab on my author page.

The other day I finally got around to watching the first episode of Britain From Above. The episode talked about the various networks that keep Britain working: water, sewage, electricity, gas, road, shipping, trains, telecommunications and so on.

One segment was about the railway system during the rush hour (might only be viewable by those in the UK). The description runs:

Transport expert Jon Shaw reveals that every morning as millions of people start their long commute to work they are using a system which is so overloaded it is on the brink of disaster.