Don’t call me DOM

So, while exploring the world of Web video, after having successfully transcribed a one hour long video of one my presentations, and turned that transcription into an HTML 5 video with subtitles, I started to look in more details as to what HTML 5 brought to the table that made this synchronization possible.

The rather obvious change that HTML 5 brings to the table is the HTMLMediaElement DOM Interface, and in particular the currentTime property, which at any time reflects the part of the media content that is played.  Read more... (883 words, estimated 3:32 mins reading time)

To celebrate the progress of GRDDL towards its final stage, and to replace the aging and somewhat unreliable XSLT-based GRDDL demonstrator, I’ve just released a brand new W3C GRDDL service.

It simply takes a Web page and extracts the RDF statements it can find in there using GRDDL.

I have made its source code available on W3C Public CVS server, but the gist the work is done by the underlying library, python-librdf, the Python binding for Redland. Particular thanks to Dave Beckett who provided amazing user support to help setting this up!

I haven’t written about GRDDL for a long time, and in fact haven’t been much involved in its recent developments; but seeing it published as a Proposed Recommendation some 3 years after the first draft I wrote, and less than a year after its first public working draft in the Recommedation track, it feels like my baby just graduated!

Kudos to the GRDDL Working Group for the amazing job they did of formalizing, cleaning and working out the hard issues that existed in the original specification!