When
· Naughties
· · 2003
· · · July
· · · · 04 (2 entries)
On Nations · Tuesday was Canada Day and we had a fine holiday; Friday is the Fourth of July, when our southern neighbour will be waving more flags than usual and its thinkers intoning on What America Means. In my forties and having had the luxury of seeing many nations up close, today I understand not at all what a nation is, what it means to be American or Bolivian or Japanese or Egyptian. But it’s a thing worth worrying about, and brought downstage centre by the coincidence of dates, and also by the fact that I’m having trouble evicting Old Glory from my menubar ...
On Search: UI Archeology · This chapter of the On Search saga is a side-trip; a look at an unusual search user interface I built a dozen years ago. One of the reasons it didn’t catch on back then was that there wasn’t enough XML in the world. Now that there is, maybe this bit of legacy code will provoke an idea or two. Just maybe, it contains some ideas that will be useful to the folk who are wondering how to make the power of XPath and XQuery useful to ordinary people ...
