ZedneWeb
Quidquid latine dictum sit, altum videtur

July 10, 2002

Evan Williams recently noted that people often link to the print-friendly version of an article, suggesting that their smaller, less encrusted with advertising nature makes them easier to read. He also suggests that on-line magazines may take steps to prevent this, for whatever reason. (And probably not the step of not having a separate printer version.)

Certainly, the simplicity is a big part of why I do it, but there’s also the issue of sites that split articles into multiple parts. I generally prefer one big file to a bunch of smaller ones, especially if they’re continuous. #

More on domains

Having referenced John Gilmore’s argument against ICANN, it’s only fair to note this response from Joe Sims, who writes that Mr Gilmore “doesn’t have a clue about most of what he is talking about”. At this point, I’ll freely admit that I don’t know enough about the situation to judge who makes the better argument. I will say that it’s amazing how much bureaucracy has been built up around what should be a fairly straightforward process. (via ICANNWatch)

The best suggestion I’ve seen for bringing sanity to the domain name system involves getting rid of generic top-level domains, which solves many of the problems. A big part of the cybersquatting problems (real and imagined) comes from the fact that com has such a cachet. If there were dozens or hundreds of top-level domains run by different registrars, then someone who couldn’t register mycompany.verisign could get mycompany.isc or something. One might object that this makes it difficult to figure out what domain a company has, but that’s the case today as it is. In the future, search engines will make “good” domain names less important. #

Date and time

I’m working on a standard way to present information about weblogs, and one of the pieces of information is the date that a post was published. I naturally gravitated towards the recommendations given in the W3C date and time note, which defines a profile of ISO 8601, the international standard for representing dates and times.

While poking around, I came across two good articles explaining what ISO 8601 is about, by Markus Kuhn and Jukka Korpela. They do a pretty good job explaining what the standard is and why we would need one, so I won’t take space here to go into detail here. #