The Twaddle · Grey Nicholson

Introduction

2007-07-09T13:45:00+00:00

So… This blog's going to be centred around the idea of decay and how it affects our perception. And then how that leads to assumptions, and illogical categorisations (putting things into boxes where they don't belong).

I'm already guilty after one sentence—to whom does “our” apply? Just me? Me and a few friends? Me and you? (Hi! by the way.) Every person alive today? Every human including the dead and yet-to-be-born? Every mammal? Every animal? Or absolutely every living being including plants and such?

Yeah. Tough one.

Of necessity, I'm going to have to reduce generalisations to only those that apply to me. Generally, though, I'm going to try to challenge assumptions by stretching applicability to the widest sense possible.

I'm not going to criticise directed writing or speech in English for assuming the audience is human—at the time of writing, only humans can understand English beyond a few words—but I will use things being assumed when they shouldn't be as starting points for wider thoughts.

I've written about this sort of stuff before—simplistic things like my “rant about foreigners” in which I complained about an American website using units of measure that were familiar to them, but that a wider, non-American audience found awkward or even incomprehensible. I've also written about what's in the solar system, trying to use language that most objectively describes the reality of what's there, as well as removing the historical misemphasis particularly of Pluto, but also of the “major planets”. (I only just realised that that entry was relevant to this.)

A lot of my photo art has a theme of decay and imperfection. In Four (I use ¡Forward, Russia! nomenclature for the pictures I publish) I tried to make a picture of a murky sky over Hartlepool (Great Britain, Earth etc.) look bright and sunny; the result has a clear air of artificiality (quite possibly due to my lack of GIMP mojo).

For Ten, I drew around the photo by hand, sloppily, creating an outline that was clearly produced in this way. Both of these were an attempt to highlight how the reality of what I photographed gets filtered en route from the camera to the viewer, by artificially filtering the pictures even more; and in the case of Ten, by intentionally introducing imperfections.

As another example of me playing with imperfections, I began my Thirteen series by focusing on the most obvious imperfection the camera recorded (part 1)—the overexposure of the Sun. I then focused on the same area but with the imperfection removed and the sky recoloured to blue, the colour you'd expect of a sky; the resulting picture (part 3) is—in my opinion—less interesting than part 1. And finally, I couldn't bring myself to “waste” such a good photo (again, my opinion, of course) by not publishing the full thing as it was “supposed” to look (part 4)—an example of the valiant fight against decay.

One more thing: there's an article on The Twaddle, a now-mostly-defunct website I run, about the English language (indeed any language) being an intrinsically imperfect representation of what the speaker is trying to express; it argues that this imperfection, the nuances that are applied to any perception that passes through a brain, ought to be appreciated. 00101 01110 00111 01100 01001 10011 01000 01001 10011 00011 01111 01111 01100 wasn't written by me (the author now prefers to remain anonymous for unstalkability reasons) but it probably comes closest to the type of thing I intend to write about on this blog.

(By the way, earlier, “our” applied to anything that can perceive, which I think means any animal.)

Hash those hs!

2004-06-21T13:55:00+00:00

A quick request of everyone who writes web pages, especially weblogs, or who designs web page templates:

Give every heading an id, so that other folks (and you) can link to sections of an article or entry.

It's not quite Purple Numbers but it does the job more than effectively (and it's not half as overkilly). I reckon it's fair to assume that if someone wants to link to a part of your page in another page, they'll have the ability to view your page's source and find the ids. And if they can't, purple numbers would probably befuddle them anyway.

I do it automatically - it really takes little effort. Another point is to use proper titles, not #title4, so that if you add a chunk, nothing will break (and referring urls look much friendlier).

The Twaddlebot has been unleashed

2004-06-07T18:40:00+00:00

Last night version 1.0 of The Twaddle went live. It uses arbitrary XML and XSLT to generate valid XHTML pages... offline.

The idea of uploading bare-bones articles and an XSLT template, allowing the browser to generate pages as they're required, was a no-go. But I managed to rig up the transformation offline, to be run as a batch.

Following the tradition of giving XML languages names that are barely-logical acronyms beginning with X, I call the language XTw, which stands for XML... Twaddle... something.

Here's how I worked the magic (borrowing liberally from a newsgroup posting I made on the subject):

This assumes: no programming experience, but enough computer savvy to create XML and XSL files to need transforming in the first place; and a Windows (XP) machine)

First off, you'll need Xalan, available from http://xml.apache.org/xalan-j/ (and the requisite Java runtime, which you probably already have)

The actual file I downloaded was http://apache.rmplc.co.uk/dist/xml/xalan-j/xalan-j-current-bin.tar.gz

There's also http://apache.rmplc.co.uk/dist/xml/xalan-j/xalan-j-current-bin.zip if you prefer a zip.

The version I got was 2.6.0 (the Java version).

Unzip Xalan into a folder. I used C:\Program Files\xalan-j_2_6_0

Now the code from http://evc-cit.info/cit041x/batchfiles.html#transform:

echo off java -cp h:\java\xmljar\xalan-j_2_5_1\bin\xml-apis.jar;h:\java\xmljar\xalan-j_2_5_1\bin\xercesImpl.jar;h:\java\xmljar\xalan-j_2_5_1\bin\xalan.jar;. org.apache.xalan.xslt.Process -IN %1 -XSL %2 -OUT %3 %4 %5 %6 %7 %8 %9

The only line break should be after echo off.

Copy this into a plain text editor (e.g. Notepad), and save it as filename.bat (I used ANSI encoding, if it matters)

You should now have an MS-DOS Batch File.

(Apparently some versions of Notepad append .txt to filenames, even if they contain a file extension. In these cases, quoting the filename - e.g. “filename.bat” - allegedly solves the problem)

You'll most likely have to modify the code to point to the actual locations of your Xalan installation and files.

I only plan on using one XSL stylesheet with multiple files; the input files will be filename.xml. The output files will be filename.htm and will be kept in the folder above the one where the input and XSL files are kept. So, I modified the code a little:

java -cp "c:\program files\xalan-j_2_6_0\bin\xml-apis.jar";"c:\program files\xalan-j_2_6_0\bin\xercesImpl.jar";"c:\program files\xalan-j_2_6_0\bin\xalan.jar";. org.apache.xalan.xslt.Process -IN %1.xml -XSL "c:\path\to\an\xsl\file\xsl.xml" -OUT ..\%1.htm

This should all be on one line. %1 in the code will be replaced by the first argument passed to the batch file, %2 by the second argument, etc. ..\ means up one folder. The quotation marks around the filenames cause them to be treated as one item, despite their containing spaces.

You can add @echo off (without quotes) in an empty line above, if you prefer not to have masses of textual output in the command console. e.g.:

@echo off java -cp "c:\...

echo off turns off the display of subsequent commands; @ hides the echo off command.

To perform the transformation, open a command console (Start > Run > "cmd") and navigate to the location of your XML, XSL and batch files, by typing

cd "c:\path\to\files"

(including the quotes)

For simplicity's sake, I've shoved everything in the same folder, and used absolute paths for the programs. You could probably also mess around with relative paths or the path environment variable, but I can't be bothered.

I ended up having to use HTML Tidy to contort the output into valid XHTML. My final batch file reads:

java -cp "c:\program files\xalan-j_2_6_0\bin\xml-apis.jar";"c:\program files\xalan-j_2_6_0\bin\xercesImpl.jar";"c:\program files\xalan-j_2_6_0\bin\xalan.jar";. org.apache.xalan.xslt.Process -IN %1.xtw -XSL "XTw2XHTML.xsl" -OUT ..\thetwaddle\%1.htm "C:\Program Files\HTMLTidy\tidy.exe" -q -m -c --show-warnings no --output-xml yes --output-xhtml yes -latin1 --doctype strict --tidy-mark no --wrap 0 --ascii-chars no --drop-proprietary-attributes yes --fix-bad-comments no ..\thetwaddle\%1.htm echo Done %1.

(Line breaks have been doubled for clarity.)

The input XML files are all labelled filename.xtw; the XSL stylesheet is XTw2XHTML.xsl, and the output files are cacked into the folder thetwaddle, a sibling of the folder where the batch file lives, and assigned a suffix of .htm.

Those options shown for Tidy are the result of trial and error, or rather, trial and testing and reading Tidy's Quick Reference - no warranty implied. The echo command prints out a message for each finished file.

This batch file is wrapped up in another one, which repeatedly calls the first, thus:

@echo off echo Transforming XTw into XHTML... call xtw2xhtml afile call xtw2xhtml otherfiles echo Done.

The text output is just to make the command console more interesting while the batch program is running. It also helps pinpoint any errors, such as typos, which show up as blobs of text in the command console.

The result of all this fiddling is that I can change pages' contents more easily; I've been able to, fairly easily, implement a few minor changes that would have taken effort before. The final product lives here.

In semi-related news, it turns out that PURLs such as purl.org/mooquackwooftweetmeow, without the trailing slash, are possible - it's just partial redirects that have to end with slashes. The Twaddle's now on PURLs, too - purl.org/thetwaddle - with or without the slash.

While uploading “Unleash The Twaddlebot!” (The Twaddle v1.0), I was reminded that we're approaching the 50-file limit; that's not including styles, which are kept in a separate account. This means we'll probably have to change hosts.

Fortunately, ntl provide 55 megabytes of space, so I'm planning to shift everything there. This shouldn't be too troublesome now that everything's on PURLs.

On-the-fly page validation

2004-06-01T18:15:00+00:00

I wonder if this is possible. I've been dabbling with JavaScript a little recently, in order to produce The Twaddle's Expletatron and this seems like something that should be possible with JS:

I want a script that can load up a given remote page (internally - I don't want to display the page, just to extract info from it), look at an element on that page with a given id, and return its class as a variable.

What's this got to do with validation? Well say the remote page was http://validator.w3.org/check/referer and the given id was result. Then, if the returned variable is valid (i.e. the class of that element is valid) you've got a valid page; if the returned variable isn't valid you haven't.

So, you could, using JavaScript, whack in a “Valid XHTML” logo if, and only if, the page is actually valid. If you like, you could throw in an “Invalid!” image if the page is not valid.

I know it's possible to refer to an element by its id; I know it's possible to get the content of that element. I don't know if it's possible to get an element's class, and I'm guessing it's slightly impossible to do all this for another, remote page.

It'd be nice though.

Chameleon

2004-05-23T00:41:00+00:00

The Twaddle v0.21 is up. It now has multiple, user-choosable themes; the current options are the three (“modern”) themes that have already been published - Forest, St. George and Yellow Sky, plus the Default theme, currently Yellow Sky.

I've already created three more themes that have never been published - Mars, Ocean and Sphinx, and I have a nice photo of a sunset from which to create a Sunset theme. A now-revised version of Mars will be made the default theme some time in the coming week.

Stop! Thief!

2004-05-21T01:07:00+00:00

I've read articles about CSS design theft before - I never thought I'd be a victim.

Check out these beauties: 1, 2.

2 is obviously related to 1; I'm reliably informed that 2 is 1's brother. I pointed 1 towards my CSS for The (excellent) Twaddle (which we've just vamped once more - take a look) in order to help him learn CSS. I explicitly (although friendly...ly) told him not to nick it - to make his own. What does he go and do?

Some of the CSS can only have been nicked, as it's both identical to (a former version of) mine, and a bit daft (i.e. it'd be an hellish coincidence if any brain other than mine came up with it).

e.g.: in 1's stylesheet, the font declaration proceeds thus: 'Trebuchet MS', Trebuchet, Treb, Helvetica, Helv, Arial, sans-serif. I don't know of any fonts called Trebuchet or Treb; I just threw them in on the off-chance that there was a non-MS version or an incredibly old version (I know Helv does/did exist); I recently removed the extraneous fonts.

#content {list-style-type: none}?! I'm sure that was a daft cut-'n'-paste error I once made. Otherwise it's just stupid. .leftbox, .rightbox, .box-caption, .contentbox...

Thief! Get off my CSS!

He even has the audacity to include a Copyright Policy link to FACT! OK, so maybe The Twaddle isn't exactly the least copyright-infringing website in existence (we've used photography found via Google), but we recently (very recently) switched the main site header to original photography and plan not to borrow from others if at all possible.

In his defence... he's given us a link. That makes it OK then. Soon, I shall be providing a link to www.coldplay.com and creating a lot of original music.

Adventures in XML

2004-04-27T17:40:00+00:00

I did manage to get the XML+XSL-based jiggery-pokery for The Twaddle working - quite nicely, actually. Getting the entire contents of the content field onto the page took a little bit of effort, as described on the mozillaZine forums.

I won't be implementing this on The Twaddle, though - for a start, Opera and KHTML don't like XSLT. And it's not half as accessible for non-standard browsers (relics, mobile devices, text browsers...) as plain, extraneous-menu-items-and-such-written-into-the-article XHTML is. Nonetheless, a working example is online for the time being.

Update: the real thing's gone live... sort of... so the prototype has been removed. Additional related blurb is contained in a later entry in this weblog.

There's a slight chance that I might implement an XML-driven article system on Mooquackwooftweetmeow, where I'm not too fussed about old and/or buggy browsers. The fact that mobile devices won't render the page is more of a concern.

Perhaps some way of pulling in external XHTML fragments could be handled in CSS3? Then again, why duplicate XSL functionality in CSS - small devices' browsers could just be taught to handle XSL.

One more Twaddle-related thing: thanks to Internet Explorer conditional comments (on which MSDN has an hilarious article), I'm now feeding IE users some nice propaganda in the foot of the front page:

You're using Internet Explorer?! You do realise that it's years out-of-date, and screws up most modern web pages, don't you? In fact it's screwing this one up right now and you don't even know it. Try a proper web browser instead.

Oh, and another tiny little piece of The Twaddle-related trivia: the version number on the front page is now in the title text of the copyright notice - it's tidier and it leaves room for a pointless codename.

Over to the Mooquackwooftweetmeow Weblog now, where, thanks to our old friend XML namespaces, and our newer friend the XSL copy-of element, proper links are now in use. I've gone back through the weblog and updated plain text URLs to be links. The more observant of you will have noticed that there have been a smattering of links throughout this post - that'll be the norm from now on.

The even more observant of you will have noticed line breaks as well. I'd use paragraphs but the XSL stylesheet inserts the content into a paragraph - I don't think the XHTML validator would like paragraphs within paragraphs (not that it'd like this Atom file at all...). And I don't think the site's CSS would like divs to hold the text, in place of paragraphs; it might - I just haven't looked at mqwtm's CSS in ages so I can't remember. Besides, line breaks are lighter on the markup than open-and-close <xhtml:p> tags.

And in a final twist of XMLish loveliness, I've chucked a few XHTML <code> tags in as well.

</epic>

Opera + XSL = Eugh

2004-04-23T14:16:00+00:00

Evidently Opera doesn't like XSL - this weblog shows up as a lot of plain text with the odd URL chucked in. The question is whether I care.

The Twaddle is more of a public offering than this weblog, so it matters a little more if it's inaccessible using Opera... but then how many readers of The Twaddle use Opera? I'd say few to none. (Checking the site stats for The Twaddle will probably show a few Opera hits - most of which are me).

IE + XML + XSL + XHTML + W3C = Get In!

2004-04-23T14:07:00+00:00

As a prelude to some major back-end renovation I'm planning for The Twaddle, I decided to see if I could get Internet Explorer 6 to display this XSL-ified weblog nicely, not accounting for IE-unsupported CSS (which is already taken care of at The Twaddle). Previously, IE displayed the DOCTYPE declaration as plain text at the top of the page; using strategic HTML commenting, I've managed to prevent it from doing so.

Actually, I bet simply removing the DOCTYPE declaration wouldn't affect either Gecko or IE's rendering of the page, as I think XML kicks both of them into standards mode anyway.

The next step is to try this with some of The Twaddle. And I'd probably best check Opera's effort, too.

Hurrah for Ridiculous Quotes!

2004-04-23T02:12:00+00:00

While perusing this weblog at this ridiculous hour, I happened to follow my (text) link to the April Fools' Day thread on The Twaddle Forums, whereupon (oh, yeah!) I saw this most ridiculous quote from my cousin, who likes to call himself bob:

so far 197 posts have been affected by the_word kangaroo

- underscore and all. I think this calls for a colon-dee :D

And while making this post, I remembered that Britain is now on BST, so my last couple of posts may have actually been an hour earlier than they say (this one's about right). I shan't change them for I haven't the arsibility.

And finally, drop by The Twaddle over the next couple of days - it's been St.-George'sed.

April Fool!

2004-04-01T20:40:00+00:00

Only kidding - it's not really.

Last Wednesday (the 24th) we “relaunched” The Twaddle. In fact, the only change made to the XHTML was the addition of unique page id's - something I've always done on Mooquackwooftweetmeow but never used. The rest of the jiggery and/or pokery was accomplished using just CSS and a few Google Image Searches - a testament to the power of CSS and the excellence of my XHTMLing.

We've also got some nicely foolish spiel on the front page about The Twaddle shutting up shop. In case the date of March 32nd, and the Can you say April Fool? message at the bottom of the page didn't tell you: it's an April Fool, fool. And finally, we've screwed with the forums' word filter, replacing innocuous conjunctions with words such as cheese and Alan Shearer - see http://thetwaddle.proboards27.com/index.cgi?board=atrium&action=display&num=1080773096 for the complete damage assessment.

The Twaddle is now printastic, and other web-authoring-related digressions

2004-03-08T19:30:00+00:00

A while ago I added a print stylesheet to Mooquackwooftweetmeow; now, The Twaddle's had the same treatment. On Saturday I also gave The Twaddle a site icon, so the site's now approaching Mooquackwooftweetmeow in completeness. Does this mean v1.0 any time soon? Probably not...maybe.

I've been meaning to overhaul Mooquackwooftweetmeow's underlying XHTML/CSS for a while, mainly due to unnecessary over-id-ing in anticipation of some sort of use in future. My approach to The Twaddle was exactly the reverse - things were added in as and when needed. The Twaddle went from idea to reality in two days, and from blank files to website in one evening, so I didn't really have time to consider what id-s might come in handy later.

The Twaddle was initially based around some content - the website only existed to purvey the content. By contrast, Mooquackwooftweetmeow has only ever existed “for the hell of it”. The approach taken with The Twaddle seems to have worked better. Mooquackwooftweetmeow seems perhaps over-designed now; the Georgia font probably didn't help as it prompted the small-caps for the “UTC” at the foot of each item; this is titled with “Co-ordinated Universal Time”... all of which seems rather over-elaborate.

Another source of much annoyance is the fact that the menu items aren't centred; I might have another bash at centring them nicely...

It's Still Not A Tree

2004-02-10T00:15:00+00:00

Mooquackwooftweetmeow's been a bit dead recently, but with good reason. I've been working on The Twaddle, a magazine-style thing I and my most esteemed colleague, Matthew Gardner, set up a couple of months ago.

The site first came about in mid-December, in response to our college (Hartlepool Sixth Form College)'s new newspaper, entitled “I Was Once a Tree”, or “I.W.O.T.”. To put it mildly, we thought it was a bit rubbish, and set about creating an alternative, better, web-based college magazine. The site's original title was “This Wasn't A Tree”, and we used the acronym, too.

The college paper having been released on a Monday, we were rather pleased to have the site going, and our first visitors, on Wednesday night. Then came the Christmas holidays and, for a while, the site was dormant; but in January, we embarked upon a monumental, unauthorised postering spree. (i.e. we printed off some posters and stuck them up about the college.)

Now, it turns out one requires permission to put posters up in the college; we'd assumed one didn't, given the proliferation of “Happy 18th!” posters. And I don't think the fact that our name was written acrostic-style helped.

That Friday, the head of the English Department “had a chat” with us, and it was agreed that our parodytastic name would be changed; and that our (few, passing) references to I.W.O.T. would be removed, on account of their having demoralised the I.W.O.T. writers.

That evening, I decided upon the new name, and relaunched the site, as “The Twaddle”. As a result of the “chat”, we could no longer claim to be the “unofficial” college magazine; evidently “unofficial” wasn't unofficial enough. This actually worked in our favour, as participation in the site was no longer restricted to HSFC's students, as it'd felt before.

Soon after, we launched The Twaddle Forums, which currently comprise over 3800 posts (most non-Twaddle related, it must be said); and we recently launched an RSS feed and klip. Just yesterday I received an email from the organisers of the unofficial college parties (we'll be starting an unofficial college soon), asking us to announce the parties on our site; this has only reaffirmed our ties to the college.

Yet one of the regulars on the forums lives in America, and we're getting page views from all over the world - Israel, Germany, Australia, Canada... OK, so I suppose none of them stayed very long.

I won't bother with a conclusion - just visit The Twaddle.