Ultimate Wiki comparison guide. Highly technical.
Andrew Stellman on how managers at corporations can learn from open source project management.
Andy Oram: Rethinking Community Documentation .
On the post before this one, I’ve been gathering lots of useful ebook links.
Uche Ogbuji develops in python and xml. Here’s his copia weblog which is far too esoteric for my terrestrial sensibilities. He’s written several articles about python and xml for the Oreilly website and I just now made the connecting between his consulting company and the 4-suite package for python. Here’s a fascinating article Uche wrote about microformats. He talks about the limitations of microformats which he concluded were by design:
One problem that the microformats technique doesn’t address at all is auto-discovery of semantics. You learn the meaning of the conventions in a microformat by reading the format specification. There are no shortcuts. If you come across a pattern in a host format that looks suspiciously like a microformat, you have no way of knowing what the microformat is for, and what its rules are unless you do some sleuthing with the help of your favorite search engine and find the spec. Even once you find the spec you almost always get an informal description of the convention. You don’t often get a schema, and you almost never get a schema structured enough to help automate processing of the format.
This is one limitation that I think is the right choice for microformats. Discovery and semantics are very hard problems, and microformats would never have got off the ground trying to solve them any more than XML would have trying to solve the problem of semantic transparency as well as syntactic transparency. Microformats are rooted strictly to the syntactic realm, and those who do need more formality and structure can build these on the basics. In this article, I am sticking as much as possible to syntactic considerations with respect to microformats, but some of these considerations are related to semantics and are informed by how semantics might be mixed into microformats.
He later talks about a initiative called GRDDL (undertaken mostly by W3C staffers) to bind microformats to RDF models.