Markup Languages, Blogger , the Web and Beyond

Ok.. This post is gonna sound like a big rant and most would probably be turned off by the web jargon. Oh well... here goes...

As the title suggested, its about markup languages. Well we don't seem to get enough of it. Although mostly based on eXtensible Markup Language (XML) which made things slightly easier. In fact, HTML (HyperText Markup Language) and the reformulated HTML base on XML rules: the XHTML (eXtensible HyperText Markup Language) is like a subset to XML.

Blogger

With the introduction of the new Blogger beta, is the introduction of a complete set of template-ing tags. It now takes XML tags instead of the classic HTML tags. Not that the support of the old tags have broken, you can choose classic if you want to, but then whats the point of upgrading if you don't use it?

Have you noticed that the you no longer need to wait to republish the entire site or the "Publish Index Only" etcetera? Well, I heard that Blogger works differently now. Instead of having published static files, the files are brought together dynamically before serving up to the browser. When a file is requested, information about the widgets and post and headers are gathered and then a HTML file is generated. It reminds me of PHP (PHP: Hypertext Preprocessor), Adobe / Macromedia ColdFusion and evem the newer Adobe / Macromedia Flex Data services.

Well judging from the namespaces given, it seems that it may be named Google Markup Language (GML).. But then again, GML also stands for Geography Markup Language for those who are familiar with mapping tools.

And by the way, namespaces refers to the xmlns section. In an attempt to explain: "XML namespaces provide a simple method for qualifying element and attribute names used in Extensible Markup Language documents by associating them with namespaces identified by URI references." (Source: W3C) But really namespaces are more useful than that and frankly, I don't know much about it myself.

Its going to take sometime again before I can come up with any new layout that conforms to w3c standards. However, for the quick and easy way of customizations, there is actually a website which already does some hacking into the new blogger beta templates. Hackosphere has some excellent methods and hacks. I use their label widget hack too..

With a 3 new namespaces, I really hope Blogger would release the schema for the namespaces. Doing so is going to make development of the templates even easier. With tools like XML Spy and the excellent Open-Source Eclipse Integrated Development Envrionment (IDE) where it is possible to customize it to use custom schemas (.xsd files).

XSD by the way "is a library that provides an API for manipulating the components of an XML Schema as described by the W3C XML Schema specifications, as well as an API for manipulating the DOM-accessible representation of XML Schema as a series of XML documents, and for keeping these representations in agreement as schema are modified." (Source: Eclipse Community)

And well API stands for Application programming interface. I shan't attempt to go into it and act like I know it well.. because I don't...

Adobe/Macromedia Flex

Well this is something that I am looking into now, ever since the release of version 2 of Flex, and the release of the free Flex 2 SDK. It uses a customized version of XML too. Known as MXML. Again, knowing XML is useful here.It is to be a framework for RIA (Rich Internet Application) development. Flex generates Flash (.swf) files as the front-end.

There isn't much I can say here since I just started looking into it.
However, for the curious, you can look at the Flex website at http://www.adobe.com/products/flex/.

Its quite free in a sense as you can develop Flex Applications with just the SDKs and a editor of your choice. My favorite is Eclipse, but even Notepad will do.

ColdFusion

Its been in the market for sometime. Can't say much about it though... Never really taken to it since ColdFusion pages require a coldfusion support to be installed on the server.

However, like the rest mentioned here, ColdFusion also has its own Markup Language called the CFML (ColdFusion Markup Language)....

And??... (Web 2.0, Web 3.0 and Beyond)

The list goes on and on and on... There are definitely more out there which other may know and I have not heard of. But the list is definitely growing. The only good thing that comes out of this is that it increases a person's employability to have these skills in the age of Web 2.0. In fact, Web 3.0 is already being disussed.

Web 2.0 is "a phrase coined by O'Reilly Media in 2004, refers to a perceived or proposed second generation of Internet-based services—such as social networking sites, wikis, communication tools, and folksonomies—that emphasize online collaboration and sharing among users. O'Reilly Media, in collaboration with MediaLive International, used the phrase as a title for a series of conferences, and since 2004 certain technical and marketing communities have adopted and loosely adapted the phrase." (Source: Wikipedia

Information about the percieved Web 3.0 is still dispersed. But according to ZDnet, Web 3.0 is divided into few secions, namely: API services, Aggregation services, Application services, Serviced clients. There is much that I haven't read about Web 3.0, but for more information, the article on the topic at A List Apart may help shed more light to it.

For now, I guess we'll have to be adaptable to the various languages and look as the web proceeds beyond into semantics, user experiences and controls.