The Zero Room

Truckloads of gratitude, of the falling to one's knees and weeping kind, are due to Andrew Clover for his excellent JavaScript patch for Internet Eexplorer's buggy background image behaviour. I can't tell you how often this is going to save what's left of my sanity.

Jeremy Keith has a nice article up on A List Apart called "Behavioural Separation". Sounds like a psychiatric disorder, but he's actually talking about separating structure, presentation, and behaviour in web pages. He has some tips on using CSS effeciently, and more importantly on applying JavaScript event handlers to elements via the DOM after the page has loaded, rather than by embedding them in your document markup. Really cool stuff.

Via a talk by Cameron Adams, I came across a new semi-serious buzzword that actually deserves to spread: Hijax.

Coined by Jeremy Keith, Hijax uses a technique called progressive enhancement thus:

The OpenDocument juggernaut rolls on, with the announcement that the OpenDocument format is now an ISO/IEC standard.  The decision about which format to trust for storing your documents is now even easier.

The Committe for Economic Development, an eminent American conservative think tank / lobby group / nexus of sinister conspiracy to rule the world, has released a new report entitled Open Standards, Open Source, and Open Innovation: Harnessing the Benefits of Openness.  This conclusions of this report are highly supportive of open standards, lukewarm but generally approving of free and open source software, and quite keen on "open innovation", which might be more informatively labelled "free data" (projects such as Wikipedia and open courseware projects are cited).

It is heartening to see that even an organisation representing the biggest of big business recognises that "Digital Intellectual Property" is a "Special Problem", to paraphrase an earlier report.

Joe "Zonker" Brockmeier astutely declares that "We need a shared blog format".  I couldn't agree more. In fact, I think his argument generalises to cover any conceivable category of software, although the problem is particularly acute in the area of web applications.

It is wonderful to be able to use, copy, modify, and redistribute free software. But having the freedom to do what you want with your data is just as important, and that requires open standards for data exchange between applications. Before selecting an application for a particular task, it is prudent to ask "What are my options if, years from now, I find another application that does much the same job, only better?"  Unfortunately, in the case of existing Web Content Management Systems, the only answer is "You will have to do a lot of manual copying and pasting," which simply isn't good enough. A good deal of tedious standards work in this area is long overdue.

In another of the increasingly frequent "no-brainer" migrations to the OpenDocument format, the National Archives is adopting OpenDocument for preserving electronic documents.  What distinguishes this migration from others is that in this instance, the organisation adopting OpenDocument is, by it's nature, not the author of most of the documents it works with.  

Unlike open standards like OpenDocument, proprietary document formats such as the many variants of the Microsoft™ Word format can only be read so long as the original software vendor remains in business and feels that it is in their interest to continue supporting the format in it's products. Many document formats in common use barely a decade ago are for this reason now virtually indecipherable.

The National Archives will still accept material in whatever format it is submitted, but is committed to the often difficult task of deciphering proprietary document formats in order to store documents in a format which will still be readable in a hundred years time.

Additional commentary here.