Web Info & Tutorials

Alex Faaborg, of Mozilla, has written an introduction to Microformats. It is basic stuff, but gets interesting at the very end with his section on The Web Browser as an Information Broker (Firefox 3?):

Much in the same way that operating systems currently associate particular file types with specific applications, future Web browsers are likely going to associate semantically marked up data you encounter on the Web with specific applications, either on your system or online. This means the contact information you see on a Web site will be associated with your favorite contacts application, events will be associated with your favorite calendar application, locations will be associated with your favorite mapping application, phone numbers will be associated with your favorite VOIP application, etc.

This is going to change the way we interact with data on the Web, and it’s something that I am going to be blogging about all this week, stay tuned.

Microformats are practical, and it would be fantastic to see rich support for them in applications other than those in the know hacking around.

Instead of looking for an “About” link on someones blog, if they have info about themselves tagged, the browser can let us know (as it lets us know that there is an RSS feed).

Chris Ravenscroft decided to build his own webtop in PHP and JavaScript and has written up the experience.

He built on:

• Sebastien Gruhier’s Prototype Window
• Mohamed Ahmed’s Users Login System
• Michal Migursky and Matt Knapp’s Json class
• InputParser.php, which I extracted from my very own nextBBS‘ source tree

If you are interested in the code behind it, you can download it here

Apparently Santa was perception to my letter for more docs in this last post: Sergio Pereira has updated his outstanding developer notes for Prototype to counterbalance 1.5rc2.

Scott Raymond and Sergio also worked unitedly to create the Prototype Quick Reference, a PDF that expands on Sergio’s scheme site. The PDF module also be updated to counterbalance 1.5 final, whenever that happens. There is also Ajax on Rails, cursive by histrion with Prototype-specific content contributed by Sergio. It also covers Scriptactulous and of RJS and another Rails limited methods for nonindustrial ajax.

Does anyone hit some reviews of either they could unification up or contribute?