Tuesday, February 12, 2002

SafeWeb's Holes Contradict Claims. The once-ballyhooed anonymizing Web service that received CIA funding is shown to have flaws. The company downplayed the recent discovery. Declan McCullagh reports from Washington. [Wired News] 2:53:19 PM

Wired News: Why This Link Patent Case Is Weak. Even if BT wins, it's hard to see what the payoff would be. Programmers insist it would be a trivial task to code an entirely new way to link Web pages. And legal experts believe that BT will never be awarded any retroactive royalties on hyperlinks. [Tomalak's Realm] 2:52:58 PM

Reading DTDs with JavaScript. In addition to formally declaring the structure of XML data, DTDs can also be used to define replacement values for entity references. In part 8 of our Web Services in JavaScript series, we learn that you can access those references through the DOMDocument object - provided you know where to look. By Yehuda Shiran and Tomer Shiran. 0212 [WebReference News] 2:51:54 PM

Frontier 8.0fc1 is available on the Support site as both an app-only release and as a full, virgin package. [Frontier News] 2:51:35 PM

Roger Schank on Storytelling as a Curriculum Framework. Quote: "Once upon a time there was a kingdom that was overrun with dragons. The people were terrorized by the dragons so they decided to build a new curriculum in their finest university to train young warriors in the art of dragon slaying" Comment: I've alluded to this before.  I think it's a solid idea. via "elearningpost" [Serious Instructional Technology] 2:51:13 PM

Where have all the Legos gone?. Quote: "The idea of reusable learning objects is a myth perpetuated by companies trying to sell content management and learning management systems" Comment:  Excerpt from an article in Online Learning.  Unfortunately, this particular article isn't online, which is why I didn't link to it.  It's sitting open right next to me at my desk however.  In a nutshell, I think he makes a reasonable case, but I would also emphasize that the underlying standards are critical to portability of content. When I talk of standards, I'm really talking of two kinds, document and protocol standards.  I believe both are critical, but shouldn't be married to one another.  I think having document standards for content, e.g. assessments, makes their portability much better.  I think that systems built on protocol standards, e.g. LDAP give you much more choice, flexibility and competition in a product category. So while I think that learning objects have been overplayed in recent years, learning content management systems should be built on these two pillars. [Serious Instructional Technology] 2:50:36 PM

Hal Plotkin: "Within a few months, artists, writers and others will soon be able to go online, select the options that suit them best and receive a custom-made license they can append to their works without having to pay a dime to a lawyer, let alone the thousands of dollars it typically costs to purchase similar legal services."  [Scripting News] 2:50:13 PM

Lyle Kantrovich: False prophets of Usability. Unfortunately NetConversions isn't the only company doing things along this line, and even many usability professionals can fall into the trap of promising to solve all of a customer's problems in one fell swoop. Usability (as a field) suffers when "experts" don't meet expectations. [Tomalak's Realm] 2:49:45 PM

Web Architect: The Crime of Sharing. John Perry Barlow. I know that this is a fairly obvious observation. That's why I'm stunned that so many kinds of sharing have suddenly, without public debate, become criminal acts. For instance, lending a book to a friend is still all right, but letting him read the same book electronically is now a theft. [Tomalak's Realm] 2:49:22 PM

Web Services Interoperability Organization (WSIO). Developers now have yet another organization to watch for Web Services information - though the relationship between the new WSIO and the W3C is yet to be determined. [xmlhack] 2:48:54 PM

Jason Gillman calls this a "Major Breakthrough!" How about a screen shot for us Mac-deprived people?  [Scripting News] 2:48:28 PM

© Copyright 2002 Raymond Yee.