The Harry
Tuttle award The weekend's Harry Tuttle award goes to
Robert Ivanc. On Friday he
wrote to inform me that my weblog was interfering with an otherwise
painless visit to the dentist:
A few days ago, I was waiting at a dentist and
trying to kill the time thought of using my Nokia 3650 (with Doris
HTML browser) to have a look at your site, to see if there's
anything there that might put my mind on other matters than the
precarious closeness of the dentist drilling machines! And what I
found out was how hard it was to get to the actual content on your
site...I had to scroll through all of what is usually
hidden...after about 10 minutes or so I finally got to the content.
Any way to redesign it, so that content gets loaded first or
putting up a mobile lightweight version?
Excellent point. I thought about this for five seconds and
realized that Rob could solve this problem for himself -- and for
others -- in a very simple way. I pointed him at the solution, and
he picked up the ball and ran with it. ...
My blog is currently available in two XML flavors: the standard feed and
the extended
feed. My suggestion to Rob was to write an XSLT transform for
one or the other, and pipe the XML content through it (using the
W3C's public XSLT transformation service) to create a lightweight
HTML rendering.
Here is the XSLT
file Rob wrote. Here's how
it renders my standard feed. Here's how
it renders my extended feed.
As Rob notes in his
writeup, there was a problem with the extended feed, so
originally he was only able to pipe the standard feed to his Nokia.
But that was my fault, not his. I kicked my setup and it seems to
be working properly now. Rob's conclusion:
Wow, that was pretty simple and quite powerful. The
power of this kind of ad hoc scripting never ceases to amaze me!
[Clarity's
Blog]
[via Jon's
Radio]
Very cool! The power of XSLT! Now I am sure we can see how
Virtuoso would extend this further? In short I will try to have
this become an attribute of my Blog.
Virtuoso could enable this site to automatically determine
what type of User Agent (clients such as Web Browsers)is
being used by the visitor and then automatically associated the
required XSTL stylesheet for the User Agent.
This was one of the very basic Virtuoso XML and XSLT demos
(circa 2000-2001).
Blogging is going to provide a very fluid demo canvas for
Virtuoso as this article demonstrates.