MarkupAsAnApi

Google’s Rich Snippets Testing Tool

halans — Wed, 02 Sep 2009 03:45:56 +0000

Finally, a big win for the Semantic Web. Google recognises the value of Microformats and RDFa for search results, especially for business contacts, personal information, product details and reviews.

Rich Snippet allows you to enhance your Google search results by marking up web pages with Microformats or RDFa.

Well, it had been known for a while, it’s just that now they provide their own testing tool, which is pretty cool, right?

Post from Jean-Jacques Halans MarkupAsAnApi blog.

Google’s Rich Snippets Testing Tool

Playing with YQL

halans — Sun, 17 May 2009 01:26:45 +0000

Note: this is an edited repost from Halans.com.

Have been playing with Yahoo!’s YQL this weekend, querying the Sydney Ferries website. Pretty amazing what it allows you to do, though the Sydney Ferries site wasn’t the best site to start playing with I guess. I did have a need to have the ferry timetable on my iPhone (especially the Neutral Bay service), so that’s why I put together Next Sydney Ferry this weekend.

The premise is pretty simple: when does the next ferry depart from Circular Quay? I had this wild idea to do cool stuff with it, but inspired by the simplicity of Next Manly Ferry, I thought I’d start out pretty simple too. And it certainly still is a work in progress with plenty of bugs.

NextSydneyFerry.com parses the timetables of the SydneyFerries.info site using YQL and JSONP. No luck with any API, so it’s pretty fragile reading in the HTML table data. Wish they made an effort marking up the data a bit more helpful (as in markup-as-an-api). One of the URLs even has a typo (“weekemd”). I additionally notice YQL not returning any results for the same query, while at other times it would, so they have some bugs too. It was an interesting YQL experiment, but since the data is not too dynamic, I will probably switch to using a more static datastore, which would also be a lot more responsive, and which would be lighter on your mobile dataplan. This is very much a first version application, with limited functionality (it shows you only the next and thereafter ferry, and only departing from Circular Quay), some noteworthy points:

it uses the server’s time so tourists don’t have to have their mobiles set to local time.
it updates the time in the background without a page refresh.
It allows you to bookmark your daily service.

Sydney Ferries allows you to repurpose their content, as long as you add their copyright notice and don’t charge for it. But they could have made it a lot easier for people to do so.

Post from Jean-Jacques Halans MarkupAsAnApi blog.

Playing with YQL

What happened to the design? CSS Naked Day April 9

halans — Wed, 08 Apr 2009 23:42:28 +0000

Yes, it’s international CSS Naked Day today! That’s why everything looks a bit black and white (and blue).

You wonder why? CSS Naked Day is about raising awareness about Web Standards and accessibility, the proper use of (x)html, semantic markup, a decent hierarchy structure. It’s time to show off my gorgeous !

To know more about why styles are disabled on this website visit the Annual CSS Naked Day website for more information.

Post from Jean-Jacques Halans MarkupAsAnApi blog.

What happened to the design? CSS Naked Day April 9

Yahoo queries microformats

halans — Fri, 16 Jan 2009 22:05:58 +0000

Yahoo’s YQL query language, a SQL-style query language for the web, now supports microformat queries. A given example is finding the address for an event on Upcoming (a Yahoo service), not using the Upcoming API, but using a YQL query to retrieve a vCard microformat in either XML or JSON, using a REST call. But it’s not limited to Yahoo services only! It works on any website with microformats, like, lets say “halans.com”, where my about page contains a vcard. Result: http://query.yahooapis.com/v1/public/yql?q=select%20adjunct.item.type%20from%20microformats%20where%20url%3D%27http%3A%2F%2Fwww.halans.com%2Fabout%2Fprofessionally%2F%27%20&format=xml

As Chris Heilman writes over at the Yahoo! Developer Network Blog:

“This will hopefully make it much easier for people to write software that consumes microformats and maybe bring the “chicken” of adding microformats and the egg of finding good uses for them a bit closer together.”

You could now use Yahoo SearchMonkey to find microformats around the web (example searchmonkeyid:com.yahoo.page.uf.hcard or “searchmonkeyid:com.yahoo.page.uf.geo halans“) and then query the microformats inside the SearchMonkey results with YQL.

Post from Jean-Jacques Halans MarkupAsAnApi blog.

Yahoo queries microformats

CSS Counters

halans — Tue, 13 Jan 2009 02:24:49 +0000

Over at SitePoint, Meitar Moscovitz writes about “A Little-known Way to Replace Some Scripts with CSS Counters“, a great example on using CSS and a page’s markup as an API:

… this is a powerful demonstration of how you can use your markup as an API to let the advancing capabilities of CSS do things you could once only do with client- or server-side scripting. Now that’s exciting.

I have an idea of where I could easily add some additional info, in stead of reverting to JavaScript, some inspiration for Mapanui v1.3. Thanks!

Post from Jean-Jacques Halans MarkupAsAnApi blog.

CSS Counters

Google developments

halans — Mon, 12 Jan 2009 01:50:45 +0000

Google had some interesting, newsworthy developments last week:

ReadWriteWeb points out triples in Google’s search results, an interesting SemWeb development at Google Search;
Google helps Data Portability move forward with some open source python scripts, with the Google Blog Converter for AppEngine: “Converters to/from various blog formats hosted on Google App Engine.”;
A new Google research paper warns us about social networks spilling our secrets when merging social graphs.

Post from Jean-Jacques Halans MarkupAsAnApi blog.

Google developments

Semantics in HTML 5

halans — Wed, 07 Jan 2009 02:18:51 +0000

John Allsopp writes about the need for mechanisms in HTML that clearly and unambiguously enable developers to add richer, more meaningful semantics, beyond pseudo semantics like microformats, and HTML 5′s new elements which are not backwards compatible. Check out the article and its comments over at A List Apart.

Post from Jean-Jacques Halans MarkupAsAnApi blog.

Semantics in HTML 5

Microformat tools

halans — Wed, 10 Dec 2008 20:35:30 +0000

Over at Sitepoint Meitar Moscovitz writes up “4 Easy-to-Use Microformat Tools to Beef Up Your Site” using minimal effort, including my favorite, Mapanui. ;-)

To get us in the Christmas spirit, over at 24 Ways, Elliot Jay Stocks shows us how to set up an Christmas hCard in “A Christmas hCard From Me To You“. If you’re looking for a simpler (non-chrismas-y) walk-through, revisit John Allsopp’s “Styling hCards with CSS” from 2006.

If you want to enable the Microsoft Oomph microformats framework in Firefox on any site supporting hCard/hCalendar, you can with Pascal’s Oomph Greasemonkey script. But take note of the notice though, the Microsoft hosted script can track your click stream…

Post from Jean-Jacques Halans MarkupAsAnApi blog.

Microformat tools

Top 10 of Semantic Web 2008

halans — Sun, 07 Dec 2008 07:45:36 +0000

ReadWriteWeb has published their Top 10 for 2008 of Semantic Web products. The list includes Yahoo SearchMonkey, Open Calais, Powerset,…

Looking at the list, I’m not too impressed. Searchmonkey is cool, but all the others are rather gimmicky. They are all semantic web for semantic webs sake. When will we see integrated solutions, like SearchMonkey?

Post from Jean-Jacques Halans MarkupAsAnApi blog.

Top 10 of Semantic Web 2008

Mapanui

halans — Mon, 17 Nov 2008 07:48:05 +0000

Have been plugging Mapanui a bit at Webjam8 (September), Ignite Spatial and Sydney Barcamp. Fun and iteresting feedback.

Post from Jean-Jacques Halans MarkupAsAnApi blog.

Mapanui