Halogen Labs Weblog

I spotted this article on C|Net (which incidentally reads more like avertising disguised as “news”) about how it’ll be easier to get data out of Acrobat files. Google already does a good job of indexing the text from PDF files, so it seems like Adobe has some tricks up their sleeves. Image extraction? That probably wouldn’t be too hard. The article does mention XML, which only helps to add more fuel to the speculation that Cocoon could be behind what Adobe is doing.

Adobe recently acquired Accelio, which had a whole slew of interesting things — electronic forms processing, along with some other stuff that just looks like document templating. Hmm. If Cocoon isn’t behind it, I bet that it could easily be used to do all the stuff that the Accelio software does.

Update: I played with the Adobe Accelio Capture demo, and it nothing more than a Java applet that displays and validates a form, submits to an ASP script, and then provides the user with a printable PDF version of the form. Cocoon isn’t behind it, but it easily could with XMLForms and the FOPSerializer.

There seems to be some discussion about whether Mozilla should implement contentEditable, which is not in the W3C HTML specs anywhere, but Internet Explorer does.

I take credit for starting the discussion, and I never really intended it to turn into a flame war.

What I really wanted was for people to step back, examine what was going on, and say, “Is this good for the browser?”

With all the developers and industry folk who push for web standards on sites (along with standards compliance in the browsers), it surprised me that nobody had managed to step up and say, “wait a second here”.

Scott Andrew comments on the situation:

Not implementing a CONTENTEDITABLE attribute because it violates the (X)HTML spec is an acceptable excuse. Not implementing in-browser editing features because M$ dr00lz! or no de jure standard exists is not.

Which is fair enough. Apparently there is a workaround for not having the page validate (using JavaECMAScript). I still stand that trying to duplicate what Microsoft is doing is a bad idea, but I can also agree that the Mozilla team should give the users what they want.

As far as the W3C goes, yes, standards are nice, but when they’re rolling out new specs for XHTML 2.0 when most of the Interweb hasn’t gotten past HTML 4 Transitional, trying your damndest to stick to standards and advocating everything the W3C does becomes quite a harrowing experience.

There’s also more reading at BlogZilla, and this article by Tim Powell regarding the matter.

I also noticed this blurb about enabling the “marquee” tag in Mozilla. This really makes me want to fork Mozilla, and write a browser called “Der Fuhrer 2000″, in which anything not standards-compliant is streng verboten. If your page doesn’t validate, all you’ll get is a blank page :)

Matthew Langham points out something called “Adobe Document Server” along with a bunch of other software (”Forms Server”, “Output Server”, “Workflow Server”) designed around PDF. He also notes that Cocoon could be a likely suspect.

Digging around Google revealed this, this page at Adobe, this whitepapr at Adobe (PDF), as well as this FAQ at Adobe (PDF).

Among the features listed:

• Eliminates need for Reader software
• Performs server-based printing and faxing
• Views Acrobat PDF files within a Web browser
• Converts PDF documents into GIF or JPEG images
• Displays images along with a toolbar

This is interesting, they seem to be un-doing the need for PDF :) the second item is mildly interesting, and the third and fourth items could be easily achieved with a PDF2HTMLSerializer or a PDF2JPEGSerializer :)

Along with my switch from Radio UserLand to MovableType, I spent all day yesterday backing up a bunch of mp3s, and wiped my Windows partition off my computer. I installed FreeBSD.

I’ve never used BSD as a desktop system (mainly on headless servers), and so far the experience has been pretty good.

The install didn’t take too long, and while the install was totally text-based (Newer flavors of Linux manage to start some sort of X server for install), the whole process was fairly painless. The install app decided on some reasonable partition sizes, and I was off.

Since I was to be using this as my main desktop system, I chose to install the X packages, and chose Gnome + Sawfish as my windowing environment. Everything worked, save my monitor refresh rate being slightly too low, and my mousewheel not working. Adding one line to /usr/X11R6/lib/X11/XF86Config fixed the mousewheel problem.

Logging in, I typed “startx” and I was off. Gnome and Sawfish started without a hitch. Impressive.

However, I managed to hit a couple real big hurdles while trying to get Java installed. It seems that when one tries to run the Java port (/usr/ports/java/linux-sun/jdk14) as a non-root user, the binary crashes. BSD is able to run Linux binaries, so that wasn’t a problem. A cursory search on Google revealed that it was a problem with the kernel, so I set off to manually patch it myself. This was easier said than done, and it seems that the patch provided fails. I noodled around with it for a number of hours before taking a break.

It would be a big bummer not being able to get Java running on my box, especially if I want to do any sort of Cocoon development locally.

Welcome to my shiny new MT weblog. Extra-special thanks to Tim for helping me set up this beast.

More coming soon…