OK, I came across mezzoblue.com's RSS 2.0 feed somewhere in the comments to Dave Winer's recent rant on RSS.  To say I was stunned is an understatement.  Somehow I know I am glimpsing the future, but, man, is it hard to get my head around.  Near as I can see, all they have done is harness the power of XML and bam! 

How about some details.  Let's start with the feed.  It is a valid RSS 2.0 feed.  It uses the extensibility features of 2.0 to bring in additional namespaces and standard XML to declare a stylesheet.

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="iso-8859-1"?>
<?xml-stylesheet type="text/xsl" href="style.xsl" media="screen"?>
<rss version="2.0" 
    xmlns:dc="http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/"
    xmlns:sy="http://purl.org/rss/1.0/modules/syndication/"
    xmlns:admin="http://webns.net/mvcb/"
    xmlns:rdf="http://www.w3.org/1999/02/22-rdf-syntax-ns#"
    xmlns:content="http://purl.org/rss/1.0/modules/content/">

More about XSL is here.  If you take a look at the XSL file referenced in the feed, you will find a deceptively simple layout file.  It is very basic and simply tells the browser what to do with each RSS element.  It even contains a <div> for the sidebar used on the page.  The XSL file references a basic CSS that completes the layout and formating details.  So there it is, 3 simple files, and, ta-da, an attractive website that can be consumed by browsers or aggragators with no problem.

This is important because HTML is going to go away.  It has a lot of draw backs in terms of functionality and layout that developers and designers have been working around for years.  Let's just think of frames and nested tables.  By looking at the mezzoblue feed it is possible to see a complete site that contains nothing but XML files, no HTML.  When you point a browser at the mezzoblue feed, the borwser renders the XML.  Viewing the source from the browser shows the valid feed, nothing more.  But, boy, do you see more.  I can easily imagine a site generated as a series of XML files.

Actually, I know a site that at least contains a series of XML files that represent its content.  Dave Winer's newly rebuilt scripting.com.  Dave has this idea that his site could function as a large directory and that each day and each category should have its own feed.  This is a cool idea and it works well with blog.  Of course, Dave being Dave went ahead and followed through.  The result is the latest iteration of scripting.com.  For the current discussion, let's focus on  notion of generating an RSS feed for every day.

Currently scripting.com appears to be in 2 flavors: HTML and RSS.  Each exists in seperate tree.  Using the techniques demonstrated at mezzoblue, Dave could eliminate the HTML branch and just use the RSS.  (more to come)

4:38:20 PM    comment []  

IE Flaw Allows Spoofed URLs. A newly discovered flaw in Internet Explorer allows the browser to display a spoofed URL in its address and status bars, making it easier for Internet scam artists to trick web users into sharing sensitive data with bogus web sites. [Netcraft]

Yawn.  This spoof is really old, I do believe.  Folks have used it or something very like it to do things likes spoof MSFT sites, fake news events, etc.  Some of the web's less savory tenants have used spoofed addresses like this to drive clicks through ads for a long time.  Other browsers are alos suspectible to being mislead in a variety of ways.

2:47:44 PM    comment []