XML is almost 10 years old now. IT Conservative brings up something, albeit making it bigger than it really is, that is a point worth making:
I grew up with the idea that it is better to put a bit more effort into something at the beginning so that you would safe a lot of cost later. XML is the perfect example of something that does exactly the opposite. XML is simple. It’s simple to write, it’s simple to program with, but it is very verbose. Simple things take kilobytes of space. Why is that bad? Because it takes memory, processing power and bandwidth. You only have to program something once, but the memory usage, waste of CPU cycles and waste of bandwidth just keeps going on and on and on forever.
I know that binary XML has been brought up over and over again, but it might not be such a bad idea.
There are two things going on right now that really capture my attention (as far as web 2.0 goes):
- Twitter, Jaiku and to a lesser extent Pownce
- Facebook
I talked about Twitter before (here and here). I did not mention facebook much I think. I became a member a month or two ago and have been loving it ever since. Not only is it the best and cleanest social networking site that I’ve come across, the recent additions of applications into facebook is very interesting. It is possible for third-party developers to build application inside facebook. There are now a couple of hundred of those, most interesting web apps also run in facebook now, such as last.fm, the zoho apps, google reader and many more. Here’s my public facebook page (it only shows very little information).
Facebook is aiming at becoming an operating system, which I find fascinating. People have been trying to build Web OSs for years but none really succeeded, will facebook succeed? They just might I think. If you don’t use facebook yet, I suggest you give it a shot.
I had some more time to read some and explore some new weblogs the past few days. One of the more amusing ones is a new kid on the block: IT Conservative. Written by someone who clearly is no big fan of free software, given the tag-line: “Fighting the war against Free Software fundamentalism.” His (or her?) posts are often amusing, here are some:
Subscribed.
Here’s a nice and long Javascript tutorial. I haven’t done much with Javascript for the past years and was never that familiar with the things beyond basic control structure, simple DOM things and functions and things. This tutorial gives a nice introduction into JS’s object model. A good read.
