tnl.net

Usability 101: Learnability

June 17, 2003

The con­cept of learn­abil­ity is a key one to usabil­ity design. Basi­cally, it boils down to how easy a sys­tem is to learn. This, in turn, can be bro­ken down into five com­po­nents: famil­iar­ity con­sis­tency gen­er­al­iz­abil­ity pre­dictabil­ity sim­plic­ity Let’s delve fur­ther into each of those in more details. Famil­iar­ity The con­cept of famil­iar­ity is almost self explanatory. […]

Open or Closed?

May 10, 2003

It seems that the Apple music store is now encrypt­ing their XML files. I’ve con­firmed that it is indeed doing so and won­der what this means in terms of changes to the XML files (more info on the con­tent of those XMLs up until yes­ter­day can be found in a pre­vi­ous entry. If any­one out there […]

Apple, XML, and the Music Store

May 5, 2003

Thanks to Tim Bray, we now know that there is an XML inter­face to the Apple Music Store. In the search for more infor­ma­tion to under­stand what was pro­vided to us and what they were get­ting from users buy­ing infor­ma­tion, I checked inside the actual track XML. In this case, I picked an XML sam­ple file from […]

Module Madness and Semantic Stupidity

April 25, 2003

Warn­ing: This is a very geeky arti­cle. As read­ers of the weblog may have noticed, I’ve been get­ting into an increas­ingly obscure area of the Inter­net by try­ing to meld two dif­fer­ent web for­mats (RSS and XHTML) and come up with doc­u­ments that could be under­stood by mul­ti­ple devices (web browsers, RSS read­ers). The exer­cise was […]

No convergence

April 24, 2003

It seems that what I am try­ing to do will not work. The con­cept of try­ing to mix RSS with XHTML seems to be flawed, as illus­trated by the W3C feed. While it does val­i­date as proper RSS, it fails mis­er­ably when it comes to val­i­dat­ing as an XHTML doc­u­ment. This brings up an inter­est­ing point […]

A matter of Style

April 17, 2003

The WTH Remix con­test has ended and the win­ners have been announced, show­ing that some­times, the net com­mu­nity can do bet­ter than stan­dards cre­ator. The grand prize win­ner is a visu­ally arrest­ing page (com­pared to the orig­i­nal) that has only a few small things miss­ing in order to make it per­fect. First of all, I would ensure that […]

Geeks to English

March 27, 2003

CNN is run­ning an inter­est­ing arti­cle about infor­ma­tion data stores and the seman­tic web. A very sad thing was the fol­low­ing state­ment about the seman­tic web: One hope­ful jour­nal­ist from the Econ­o­mist asked Berners-Lee to give an exam­ple of how com­pa­nies could make or save money using it, but he didn’t have an answer. This is […]

Trust, truth and networks

March 5, 2003

The rag­ing cow inci­dent shows that there’s a need to estab­lish trust in the blog­ging (and maybe the web) world. Tim Bray demon­strates that most blog­gers have rela­tion­ships to prod­ucts, con­cepts, com­pa­nies, and other blog­gers. His dec­la­ra­tion of truth is a good start but there are a num­ber of things that still need to be done. Mean­while, Scott […]

Marketer, Marketer, where have you been?

March 3, 2003

There is much dis­cus­sion about Rag­ing­Cow, a new site cre­ated to mar­ket a new Dr. Pep­per soft drink. The funny thing is that some say it won’t work but the site is already get­ting free pub­lic­ity from blog­gers all over. I didn’t know about the drink prior to see­ing it on Blogdex so that makes me a suc­cess­ful target […]

Securing SOAP

February 20, 2001

The lead­ing con­tender for the com­mu­ni­ca­tions pro­to­col that facil­i­tates the world’s busi­ness trans­ac­tions is designed to trans­mit data over HTTP, in the clear. Although some of the cre­ators of Sim­ple Object Access Pro­to­col (SOAP) have expressed con­cern, the con­sor­tium respon­si­ble for redraft­ing SOAP into the new Exten­si­ble Markup Lan­guage (XML) Pro­to­col is near­ing agree­ment that […]