Craft & Artfulness

Recently I have been working on run-time adaptive widgets. Why? I've invested heavily in the Dojo Toolkit. The widget department of Dojo is all about singular, static widgets, which can be used like JavaFX, for example. They are fine for building desktop-like GUIs but, you guessed it, terrible for the mobile web. Sometimes we want a horizontal menu to be displayed vertically. I did search the web for other solutions, but they all seem to be markup-based in some way. These are great times for HTML5 and CSS3. That's what the buzz is all about. But I don't like it all that much. Writing markup is tedious and not DRY, platforms creating it are opaque and too specialist. I'd rather spend some time figuring out the best way to go about it. However, building a competitive tool from scratch has never been my forte. So I desperately cling to my current tool set (as we all do). I was going to set out creating stuff in Dojo, as I always do. Then this video came along: http://fro...

Tim O'Reilly: "Given that you put the web into the public domain... Are you a socialist?" Tim Berners-Lee: "LOL!" Opening of  "A Conversation with Tim Berners-Lee" , Web 2.0 Summit 2009. Why does Facebook have an approximate 1 billion users, Google+ 350 million and Diaspora , an open source alternative, only a meager 406,000? You could argue that Facebook started earlier and was at the time the better platform. But why was it the better platform? Because it used the infamous Social Graph. Supposedly developed by Philippe Bouzaglou in 2002, one of the early Facebook guys at Harvard University, it found its way into the hands of the Zuckerberg cabal. For further facts, watch the movie ;-) However, it wasn't the first attempt at crossing the boundaries of the Web as just a "bucket of text and links" (and the occasional image). As we know, the Semantic Web was thought up by Tim Berners-Lee, the very founding father of the aforementioned b...