Ecce Signum

I was, perhaps, over-optimistic about my productivity level this past weekend. The Chesterton remains unreadable; the Pushkin is trapped in raw text. I, on the other hand, am well-rested. Never discount the value of ignoring personal responsibilities.

A possible opportunity has arisen for me to teach introductory web design at one of the local colleges. It probably won’t be anything too fancy; basic (X)HTML, a little Javascript and CSS, maybe touch on Flash. Nothing I haven’t done before. But the idea of teaching this thing has got me thinking about the industry as a whole, and I have some ideas where I think it could/should go.

First, development/programming is a skilled trade. As such I feel it could benefit from some sort of master/apprentice based teaching paradigm, rather than classroom-based teaching. After all, how many of the good web developers out there are self taught? Apparently college education is not germane to the coding world.

Second, the current incarnation of web development is young — five years old? — and therefore still, philosophically, at a very malleable stage. As part of the fallout from the internet boom/bust, with all of the wunderkind stories about 22-year-old self-taught millionaires, web development is chock-full of loud talk and mediocre skill-sets. Pundits like Jeffrey Zeldman and Jakob Nielsen complain about how bad the WWW is, and blame laziness and superficiality among developers. But are laziness and superficiality the fault of the player, or the fault of the game, which tolerates these traits? Certainly five years of explosive growth is not conducive to reflection.

Obviously there are serious implications to applying formal structure to the web developer community. A hierarchy of talent will suddenly be available, with clients able to pick and choose whatever level they feel appropriate. We coders will have to be honest about our skills. We will have “pedigrees”, wherein a guru can say, with authority, “This person can walk the walk. You have my word on that.” The internet tends toward self-regulation in that anything which is said in public can be critiqued and refuted in public.

How difficult would it be, then, to start an apprenticeship program, both on the ‘net and in the real world, to insure that anyone who wants to get into “the business” will be able to do so with proper guidance, and anyone who is looking for a developer will be able to find one who really knows how to do the work?

More on this topic when I have had more time to research it. In the meantime, here is a study which estimates the yearly global production of information. Hint: It’s a lot.

So about 11pm yesterday I sat down to figure out how much work it would be to mark up the Chesterton book into XML. An hour later it was done. You can see it here , in the raw XML form. I expect to have an XSL stylesheet up by the end of the weekend.

Since that one was so easy, I am of a mind to do another. This one will also be a book, as the format is more simple than that of a play or a poem. What shall I pick? Hmmm…

And the winner, weighing in at a respectable 182k, is Marie by Alexandr Sergeevich Pushkin!!

My work on this classic piece of Russian literature is dedicated to Dr. Christine Rydel, of the Grand Valley State University Russian Studies Department, without whose guidance I would never have learned how to get an education in college.

On further research, it appears that the HTML Writer’s Guild initiative to mark up the Project Gutenberg eTexts lasted all of four months, from January to April of 2000. They completed a total of 124 works. This means I have my pick of almost six thousand books, poems, and plays, from a variety of formats and genres. I don’t want to start too complex. Romeo and Juliet, with its confusing (to a programmer) mix of play and poetry, is right out. Likewise War and Peace, which is just too damn long. So I need something in a standard format, chapters and paragraphs, and of a length neither intimidating nor bandwidth-hogging.

And the winner is: The Club of Queer Trades, by G.K. Chesterton!!!

Fortunately the volunteers at PG, where the books are initially converted from dead tree to electronic media, are quite good at keeping everything in a standard format. This raises the possibility of writing a script in [PERL | PHP | Python] to do the great majority of the work for me. Surprising, really, that this has not yet been done by someone else.

In other news, the website for From the Heart Yoga should be done within the week. I will then answer the question “how much free coffee is too much free coffee?”. Stay tuned…

This month marks my third year as a web developer/code monkey/whipping boy.

Every year at this time I feel a week or two of angst, because millions of people are in school and I am not one of them. I was a student for close to twenty years, and therefore September 1 is more meaningful to me as a New Beginning than is January 1.

So every September, in an effort to retain the student mindset, I give myself a Big Reading Project; a book I would not likely read, did I not have a GPA hostage to its completion. Anna Karenina was the first. Then The Brothers Karamazov, which I absolutely did not complete. Then Moby-Dick, which I finished, albeit under peer pressure. One year I actually enrolled in a class and studied the bejeezus out of William James.

Plato. Ken Wilber. Bulgakov. Nabakov. And about once a year I take another crack at Dostoyevsky.

About a year ago Scott and I discovered Project Gutenberg , and the HTML Writer’s Guild effort to mark up all of the Project Gutenberg texts into XML. We put together The Shakespeare Transmogrifier (usable across all modern browsers with nifty extras for IE5+/pc users) as an early XML/XSL experiment.

The intuitive among you may see where this is going.

This year, rather than just read a book, I will (probably) take one of the Project Gutenberg text files and convert it to XML. Then I will mirror the file and provide a stylesheet and XSL file with which to transform it into a readable/printable version.

And what are YOU doing this year?

Quick update today. Altered the stylesheet a little, obviously. Also changed the way the photo pages work, in order to get around some absolutely infuriating glitches in, well, every browser out there. And never the same glitch twice. All this from XHTML and CSS which conforms to all the latest standards.

Stupid browsers.

In order to make the pictures work I had to perform a (*gasp*) browser check.

if(document.all) {
 document.getElementById("picCaption").innerHTML = t.value;
 } else {
 document.getElementById("picCaption").innerHTML = t.attributes["value"].value;
 }

The first time I have had to do that on my site in seven months. The sharp-eyed of you will notice that I am using a non-standard HTML attribute, “value”, associated with an image. I figure, XHTML is just a flavor of XML, like MathML, or WDDX. Therefore, it is eXtensible! Why NOT use custom tags? Micro$oft does it all the time. That is why I made the browser-check as insulting as possible by checking for the obsolete (document.all) feature in IE6.