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: Tech Blog3 out of 5 Major Search Engines Use Semantic Tech
Ask.com have recently joined (or re-joined — they started with natural language search) the growing community of major search engines that are using semantic technology to add extra power to their search results.
They are focusing on making search more contextually aware. If you are searching for a music group (U2 in this instance) show the user things that relate, images, wikipedia entry, etc.
It is quite a bit like Yahoo!’s SearchMonkey enhanced results, but I don’t yet see a public API nor does it look like they are allowing people to publish their own structured data (microformats, RDFa, eRDF or DataRSS). Of course this is a big gaping hole, but one that I am sure Ask will be quick to fill.
Interesting trend
Yahoo kicked things off earlier this year by launching BOSS and SearchMonkey. Microsoft not too long ago purchased Powerset which gives them a rather large foot in the door. Now Ask is going back to its roots as.
This all can be seen as a last ditch effort to beat Google at its own game, but I don’t think so. I don’t see this as a last ditch anything. It is a natural …
POWDER - A More Personal, Trustworthy Web
POWDER is a W3C initiative that allows you to describe anything that can be referenced on the Web using semantics. The group recently reached out to Yahoo!
Douglas Crockford on Web Standards and JavaScript
I became a bit of a JavaScript fanboy while writing Simply JavaScript last year, so it was especially thrilling to get to sit down with Douglas Crockford—possibly the world’s biggest JavaScript fanboy—and geek out on our mutual love of JavaScript at Web Directions South 2008 a couple of weeks ago.
One of the most amazing things about JavaScript is that such an elegant, subtly powerful, and forward-looking language could have been born of the fiercely competitive innovation of the so-called “browser wars” of the mid-nineties. Really, all Netscape needed to get ahead was a simple scripting language to run in its browser, but somehow what it ended up building was this amazingly capable little programming language. I asked Douglas Crockford how this happened:
They were really lucky. Given the process that created the language, we should have gotten something much, much worse, because they didn’t do a careful design of requirements. They certainly didn’t give enough time for its design or its implementation. They took a prototype, which was intended just as a proof of concept, and that’s what they shipped. And it had all the problems that you would expect such …
Timezones in Rails 2.1
It isn’t particularly surprising that timezone support is a pretty important component of web applications, as the web really is a global medium. If you are building an application that has to deal with times, timezone support can make your life vastly easier.
Pixel Fonts a Hot Button Topic at WDS08
In his talk on Elegant Web Typography at the Web Directions South 2008 conference last week in Sydney, Jeff Croft raised a few eyebrows when he mentioned that, for many of his projects, he has made the transition to specifying font sizes in pixels, rather than a relative unit of measurement like ems.
Traditionally, web designers have avoided specifying font sizes in pixels, because the text could not be resized by users who needed a larger font size to read it. Today, every major browser provides a Page Zoom feature that works even with pixel fonts, but one older browser version still in common use does not: Internet Explorer 6.
Pixel font sizes make it easier for the designer to match up the heights of lines of text with the other design elements on the page and achieve a uniform “vertical rhythm”. The same can be achieved with relative font sizes, but the math involved for the designer is considerably trickier.
Jeff argued that users who needed the ability to resize all text could simply upgrade to a current browser version, so for most projects pixel fonts were fair game. He admitted, however, that in projects where he …
Dmitry Baranovskiy Talks about Raphaël
Dmitry Baranovskiy is the author of the amazing Raphaël JavaScript library. In this interview, he discusses with SitePoint’s Andrew Tetlaw how the library came about, and to what degree we should ensure the accessibility of graphics on the Web.
A New Era in Drupal
Acquia, a software company based in Andover, MA, have announced a commercially supported version of the popular open source CMS, Drupal. As David reports, by offering a package of some of the better modules, this will certainly result in wider adoption of Drupal.
Web Directions South, Day Two: Crowd vs Community
Perhaps it’s because last week’s Web Directions South conference was the fifth that he’s attended that SitePoint’s Matthew Magain is more difficult to impress than he used to be. Somehow though, Web Directions South ‘08 managed to meet his high expectations.
WebJam 8: Smells Like Geek Spirits (and Beer)
What do you do to relax after a long but engrossing day of conference presentations? Why, you listen to more geek speakers at a pub, only this time with more booze and less attention span. Here’s Alex’s coverage of WebJam 8.
Web Directions South, Day One: Conversation Is King
The SitePoint/99designs team were out and about at Web Directions South today, mingling with the punters and sharing coffee and carrot cake with the speakers.
Miles mentioned in a recent issue of the SitePoint Tribune that there are a number of reasons why you should attend conferences, and gave some tips for getting more out of your conference-going experience. We’ve made it clear from the outset, however, that our objectives for attending Web Directions South are a little different.
So rather than summarise the different sessions that were on (you can read all about them on the Web Directions South site), I thought I’d reflect on our objectives for being here in the first place, and see how we’re tracking at the end of Day One.
1. Brand awareness
One very big reason for why we attend this event every year is brand awareness. Our t-shirts are bright orange for a reason—they stand out. We often meet customers in the hallway who own our books or who visit our site, and having a presence (both in the audience and on panels) means that the SitePoint brand remains fresh in the minds of people who are most likely to become customers.
We brought …
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