Xuriwan unblocked

[Xuriwan]

Repeating last post ... to me www.xuriwan.net looks like a multiple 'Dymo' labelling machine.

This seems appropriate as Xuriwan is all about impressing unique identities for objects associated with different human endeavours. Unique identification is fundamental to bar coding, World Wide Web and, come to think of it, all forms of information communication

Appropriate parts of these identities are used both for searching for and providing pertinent information on a peer to peer basis, and in combinations for assembling options as replicas of a real world entities, complete with models, images, dimensions, specifications, sources, process and raison d'être. ... and prices.

Please note: requires scripts enabled; currently only works with Internet Explorer 6+

[the tree]

Well it certainly looks nicer than when I first reviewed it.
A warning noting the requirement of IE and JS would be nice, I did get rather consused for about a minute before I remembered the name then tried it in IE.

[dera]

...

Please note: requires scripts enabled; currently only works with Internet Explorer 6+
please... what do u think the internet is for? its for sharing information content via communicating... now if your site speaks microsoft, and linux speaks penguin how could they understand each other? (i know ur thinkin of language) assume the world speaks english and can read, not everybodys computers and browsers most importantly are the same, because we like to b diffrent and unique... so what happens if a mac user with opera came on to ur site or me wit a mozilla based browser? are we not allowed to see wat the rest of the world are... c www -world wide web - ur not letting that happen by doing that.

[Xuriwan]

... assume the world speaks english and can read

You are, of course, absolutely right, but I started off on the wrong foot well before Firefox appeared for example. I am gradually sorting it out but it is made more complicated because all HTML is generated - what appears OK suddenly throws unanticipated errors. Also the design calls for mixed languages - Simplified Chinese, Traditional Chinese and English - which I have tested as workable, but not yet implemented in the current version. As most people around here speak and read only Chinese; whatever the browser, they cannot understand a thing (except the photos). So please be tolerant; all will be done quite soon.

[Xuriwan]

I have made a first shot at making www.xuriwan.net compatible with DOM but there are two outstanding problems I need help with to resolve. These concern the two element attributes “innerText” and “contentEditable” which are proprietary IE. It is these that will enable remote members of the workshop to amend or add to the words, code and notes and preview them; their suggestions are extracted and saved in the workshop for peer review, and direct adoption once a consensus is reached.

Any help gratefully received!

[Xuriwan]

Sometime ago I wrote that I joined the forum to help bring me back to the real world. For those of you that have visited the site recently (I see still 20++ open one or more of my postings each day), I hope your advice has made it more pallitable, even though it requires scripts turned on, and I have had to depreciate the functionality of the Firefox version. It is this last that prompts me to suggest a caveat about compatibility.

Important standards follow innovation (e.g. the highway code was drawn up after the invention of the automobile). This makes me wonder whether the good intentions of W3C may be promoting static rather than dynamic competition - competition for best browser performance with compliant web sites versus competition for more adventurous web based solutions. Toffler put it much better than me: "Static competition may produce the thoroughbred racehorse, but it would never produce the automobile."

I think you have to agree that most of the sites put up for review are essentially clones. How many forums, blogs, music directories, mission statements and so forth will the World be willing to support? This is an important consideration for your financial well-being in future information technology.

[dera]

xuriwan... if you could create something as good as the internet. how long would it take you? could you do it in lets say a year?
What happens when they develop a new language... or client side scripting.. wouldn't you have to adapt to this change? yes you would thats what the w3 does.
What happens when people incorrectly use things because they do not read correct documentation... you have to increase awareness and change standards.
there is no way they can see infront of time, and deal with newer problems of accessibility and technology changes. how would they know about java flash etc, if it was created after the internet?
If a group of team members where developing the internet... how would they know all the problems if it was never released on the scale it is today. think of the internet this way, its always in beta stages.

[Xuriwan]

Thank God - someone who is able to cope with the Verdana issues as well as think more deeply about the wider potential of the Internet. It just might be that a moderator accuses us of moving off topic, but I would argue that website reviews could also be considered websites' review, and anyway to hell with that, the subject is too important.

xuriwan... if you could create something as good as the internet.

In the 2005 BBC Reith lectures Lord Boers made a big point about building on what exists in order to advance. He is right, it is not a question of creating something superlative, but creating something extra useful on top. An example is electricity; if Eddison returned today he would be amazed with what we have done on top of his invention; but I imagine he would be deeply disappointed with the Internet; in equivalent terms we have only just reached the coloured flashing fairy-light stage.

how long would it take you?

I read that Sir Tim first had an early but workable version of WWW around 1984. The Internet had been around for many decades before that. I first made serious steps towards realising what is now called Xuriwan around about 1994, but experiences from the twenty years before have had a demonstrable influence. The answer to your question is ... a long time, ... and a large amount of time is down to the truism that innovation is laudable, but embarrassingly distasteful when it comes too close!

What happens when they develop a new language

Who are they? In the 1980's it was people like you who made the running. Also you might consider that, happy to bandy about the term "Information Technology", you should be also happy to acknowledge the prime language as that used for the information humans need to communicate. This is clearly not a very popular idea, so one reason I made www.xuriwan.net was to demonstrate the use of one set of code in a computer language to usefully manipulate an infinite number of words in any natural language. So the important part is the relationship between words - hence Bush's term, "Associative Indexing"

... or client side scripting ...

I was, and still am, greatly in favour of this ever since it was first promoted with the launch of Internet Explore 5.5. It seems so sensible not to have to rely on a continuous server connection, particularly if you are in sub-Sahara Africa, Outer Mongolia or Baghdad. My idea is to pick up a digital machine from a server, disconnect, do whatever you want, and if in collaboration, reconnect and return just your contribution to the task.

wouldn't you have to adapt to this change? yes you would thats what the w3 does.

Well I do not think the last part is entirely true, and from what I have read, I believe W3C may be lumbered with the bureaucrat constraints that has made the European Union Commission infamous.

What happens when people incorrectly use things because they do not read correct documentation... you have to increase awareness and change standards.

You must be careful not to confuse personal standards regarding the use or mis-use of standards and standards set to help people communicate. Overall I agree standards as set by W3C, BSI, DIN, JS and other governmental agencies are a good basis, but they are not the be-all and end-all.

there is no way they can see infront of time,

This may be a popularly accepted view, but in my experience, it is not the reality. The MSN library contains very many non-compatible HTML elements, properties and methods. These exist because some foresighted designers saw a possible need. I thank them for that.

and deal with newer problems of accessibility and technology changes.

I agree to an extent, but don't overlook underlying social changes that have been stiffled since the 1980's. For example ... "if information technology is so great, how come the standard working week hasn't been changed since 1938?"

how would they know about java flash etc, if it was created after the internet?

Pass on that, but how about if browsers were pushed into a corner by the nefarious cavaliers who put up pragmatic file sharing interfaces?

If a group of team members where developing the internet... how would they know all the problems if it was never released on the scale it is today. think of the internet this way, its always in beta stages

The prime guide is nature, how it assembles itself from small cells, how it accepts massive waste, and most importantly, how it adapts, all in pursuit of the prime objective. The alpha version of xuriwan is built like this; my problem is how to make it beta?

[Xuriwan]

Dera, I know you are interested in websites' review in relation to the evolution of the Internet. Have you seen http://support.opml.org; it seems quite a new approach to web use. It uses lists to join up diverse pieces of information to make, for example, a weblog. If you substitute weblog for a collection of information about some non-creative human activity, you are on the road to assembling a xuriwan type machine. Incidently I have rejigged www.xuriwan.net again to align with and eventually hopefully integrate with OPML technology. Any views on this outline processing?

[dera]

xuriwan i honestly do not know a thing about what your site is about or what its showing

[wheelerch]

This site dosent work for me in IE6 on windows xp... with JavaScript and everything as standard...

all I get is:

<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN">
<HTML><HEAD>
<META http-equiv=Content-Type content="text/html; charset=windows-1252"></HEAD>
<BODY></BODY></HTML>

in the source and a blank page. It also takes about a minute to load just that.

[cthurow]

Ya, I also have no idea what it is about. Lost interest very quickly. Sorry but you get 2 out of 10.

[BeachSide]

Xuriwan - Although I agree with the points you make, more or less, I must agree with Dera in that I have absolutly no idea what that site is supposed to be about.

One thing you must agree with, is that people who use the internet have the attention span of a fly. The rule "you have about 5 seconds to make it known what your site is about" is extremely true. I cruised through as much of it as I could (very slow loading and I only turned on JavaScript because I was intrigued after reading your posts without turning it on though it is only blank) and never got a grasp of what I was looking at. I saw nothing that utilized the expansive technology of JavaScript. You could have done everything you did with straight forward standard html and simple JavaScript.

[Ness_du_Frat]

hrrrr, sorry to say, but... I tested your site on FF, and it didn't work. I was about surprised, then I saw you said it worked with IE only, for the moment.
So, I switched to IE, and... I got the same thing as with FF.
I assume this is not really what I should have expected, but honestly, when I saw what I saw, I was like : OMG, what's THAT ????
Can you maybe provide a screencap of what we should be seeing ? I'm curious.
And BTW, think accessibility. I know this has already been discussed, but I would suggest to everybody to NOT submit a site before it's AT LEAST compatible in FF too. Unless you need help to make it compatible, of course.

[BeachSide]

Yo Ness, here are the first 5 pages (scr shots) of what your missing...

Enjoy :p

-See attached

[Ness_du_Frat]

I see....
Yeah, I missed two or three images, but I got most of it...
What is it about ?
I think that's still unclear to most of the people here...

[Xuriwan]

As you might have guessed I am not really into web site design, but I do have a passion for exploiting the Internet to produce a better built environment, and few other avenues are open.

Here's something I added to the workshop as an explanation:-

Imagine designing a building without drawing a line.

Imagine a handheld machine zooming in from outer space to model the physical constraints of the place the building is to be sited.

The same machine provides lists of things to consider, and when considered, provides interoperability with the regulations, products and management techniques needed to meet the objective.

Not only this, it provides models and allows them to be positioned to show how they fit, how they look together, whether their combined costs meet the budget ...

All this is technically possible but totally unattainable unless the approach to current information technology is radically changed.

The problem is how to collect and combine only pertinent information; concepts and experiments presented in this workshop are attempts to do just that, not just for designing buildings but for as many areas of human activity as possible.

... to be continued

Hope this helps and thanks for your interest and patience.

[BeachSide]

I am sorry but people are going to give me a wad of flack for this but I have to agree with Xuriwan on the concept of making something specifically for one thing (ie browser) how many things do we encounter in life that will only work for a given 'thing' think about your car for a minute... how many parts are interchangable with other cars? They all drive down the same roads. No problem there. But try to use the starter from a Caddilac in a Volkswagon... not gonna happen.

But I feel that if you are going to do what you are doing Xuriwan you need to relay your thoughts and ideas a bit more clearly and make those thoughts and ideas easier for the user to manipulate. I am sure that when you use that menu thing you have it is second nature to you. You built it after all. But I got lost using it. It was not intuitive in the least. Also it kept moving around and I found myself becoming confused as to what the relationship between the buttons were.

I am not sure so correct me if I am wrong Xuriwan, but you are targeting a specific market not just anybody who comes along, correct? Kinda like a mathematician. Anyone can visit the site, but not everybody would understand all the complex expressions and formula that existed within the site. If this is so then yes I think that making it geared specifically toward IE and using JavaScript (esp JS that is exclusive to IE) is ok in this instance. This is only ok though if you use it to it's fullest IMO. Do not use it arbitrarily just because you don't feel like scripting for simple cross-browser compatibility.

Xuriwan I believe that that you have the best of intentions but you ride a fine line. I look forward to seeing what becomes of this :D

Good luck to you!

[Xuriwan]

Thanks for your comments. May I just pursue the menu thing, as you so elegantly call my associative indexing? I would say at first that designing a machine to build other machines is quite complex, which makes the index difficult to understand. Indexes for building projects are pretty straightforward, where for example, alongside the building button is a column of other buttons representing each of its floors; against each floor another column of buttons represents each of the spaces that floor contains .... and so on ... until you get to the buttons that represent something you need to buy and install.

Why don't I show that? Well I have been down that road many times before ... "OK good idea. What does it do?" ... "the buttons can transform into images, or time bars, the trails are used for searches and displaying collections of alternative options ...." "How?" "Oh to demonstrate that I have to make a machine to assemble the specific code." ... Chicken and egg stuff I'm afraid.

In my mind the index is more an assembly of cells for ideas than a menu. (Each cell has its own trail of name/value pairs that are elaborated as the work progresses). They have to move in order to cope with the 3D nature of information.(e.g. All the floors in section or elevation, spaces in plan). Excel spreadsheets have multiple sheets to serve the same purpose. So it is more a question of the information moving to suit you or you moving to suit the location of the information. Also I believe that when the words are familiar and the user is working rather than testing, that the movement should be less distracting, and possibly quite rewarding (the machine responds).

I am familiar with the fine line but I hope not to have to resort to Ted Nelson's other famous retort: "Finally unfinished"!