Halogen Labs Weblog

Todd Huss wrote about avoiding using image tags in HTML. He brings up two points about why this might be bad.

His first argument is:

It violates the separation of content and design by including a design element in your HTML

By this argument, we’re not supposed to use img tags because it violates separation of content and design? While this is basically true, it also seems a little shortsighted. Todd’s technique is actually quite well-suited for the template portion of a page, but breaks down once you’re working with pure content. Sure, HTML isn’t perfect, but what happens if your document legitimately contains an inline image?

Let’s take a simple example, a templated website. There’s a subtle yet fundamental difference between the HTML you wrap around your content, and the HTML that your content ends up as. Let’s also assume that you’re being a good developer and using a two-step view pattern for your web publishing. You have your content in some XML format, and you transform it to HTML and merge it with the page template, and then push the rest to the browser.

By making a distinction between the actual content of your page, and the template shell, you’re able to maintain an even better separation of concerns. So now, what happens when you want to legitimately want to include an image (or something else) inline in your content? The format you’re storing your content in should be able to handle it. Transform your content to HTML (or don’t, if you’re using something good like XTHML), and then merge it with the page template. Now you can completely maintain the site template separately from the page content.

Personally, I tend to use Todd’s technique when working on the site template, and then use inline image tags in the actual content. Using img tags inside your content keeps it descriptive — moreso than something like <div class=”fishImage”/>.

As far as argument #2:

Your SEO will suffer because image alt tags don’t carry as much weight as real text

I’m not a huge SEO expert, so I tend to agree with this one. Obviously you can’t put an exact number on it, but it seems logical that your SEO might take a minor hit by using an image tag for nagivation compared to an anchor tag. Your markup should be generally clean to begin with, and a clean page template (along with descriptively marked-up content) can get you most of the way there.

I’ve been extremely busy in the past few weeks. For starters, I finally graduated college, and I now officially have my Bachelor’s Degree in Computer Science. Awesome.

Secondly, I’ve been working full-time at my new job. Unfortunately, there’s no Cocoon involved, mostly Struts with a little bit of Spring thrown in. At least now I’m getting paid to learn Struts, something I didn’t bother to waste my free time on in the past. Oh yeah, I’ve also gotten good exposure to Weblogic as well. Good stuff, but free time is down the drain.

Carsten writes:

We like to think at Cocoon as “web glue” for your web application
development needs. But most important, a glue that can keep
concerns separate and allow parallel evolution of the two sides,
improving development pace and reducing the chance of conflicts.

For more information about Apache Cocoon 2.1.3, please go to
http://cocoon.apache.org/2.1/

Download mirrors are available.

Here’s the X2EE Whitepaper (via Lambda The Ultimate). It piqued my interest, and then I saw it used the Forrest skin, and then I realized that it actually did mention Cocoon. The funny thing is that nothing about this was mentioned on the Cocoon lists, so it seems whoever is doing this is not really participating in the Cocoon Community.

I’ll be keeping my eyes open on this project.

Lately, we’ve had this bot on a private IRC network scanning the links:

[OV] MOTD requested by eddie52 (Eddie@xxx-xxx-xx-x.google.com) [irc.xxxxxxxxx.com]
[OV] LINKS ” requested by eddie52 (Eddie@xxx-xxx-xx-x.google.com) [irc.xxxxxxxxx.com]
[WI] eddie07!~Eddie@xxx-xxx-xx-x.google.com (walso)

IPs and hostnames changed to protect the innocent and shy. The IP the bot comes from is inside an IP block belonging to Google. Interesting.

LaughingMeme: Weather RSS and the Dangers of Screen Scraping

Kellan over at LM describes why screenscraping sucks: Obscure URLS, inconsistent HTML, poor data, etc etc.

I describe what needs to be done:

The real way to do this is to get hired by the NOAA and be given a license to do whatever you want with their data. Because this is highly unlikely (ATTN NOAA: Hire me plz), the best we can do for now is to manually decode metar data that we directly download from the NOAA.

RSS could bring NOAA into the 21st century, they just need to realize it.

Just been playing around with the new scheduler component which was added recently to the Cocoon CVS scratchpad. It’s everything I wanted! It’s an Avalon component so it fits in perfectly with everything already!

Here’s a sample of the log output:

Target aggregatorTrigger triggered at Mon Aug 25 01:14:16 CDT 2003

Target aggregatorTrigger triggered at Mon Aug 25 01:14:26 CDT 2003

Target aggregatorTrigger triggered at Mon Aug 25 01:14:36 CDT 2003

Target aggregatorTrigger triggered at Mon Aug 25 01:14:46 CDT 2003

I have a trigger setup to dump output to STDOUT every 10000ms (10sec). A big part of openWeather was going to be the service which ran periodically to download weather reports, now I can have this all within Cocoon! Sweet!

Scheduler docs coming soon to the Wiki :)

Looks like the Cocoon community just got a little more solidified with the creation of Orixo (via Matthew Langham), which seems to be some sort of alliance between European Open-Sourced companies who provide support for Cocoon. Also mentioned on Steven Noels’ weblog.

It seems that Lenya is being proposed as an Apache Cocoon sub-project.

Lenya is a content management system built around open standards like XML and XSLT. It is currently based on the XML publishing and application framework Cocoon.

Lenya used to be known as Wyona CMS.

Apparently they’re using Cocoon for a class entitled “XML for the Web” at RIT.Edu.