Friday 25 February 2005

Pretty ASCII heart

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XXXX| |XXX\ \ \X/ /\ /XXXXX
XXX| |XXXX/ | \ Y /XX| )XXXXXX
XX| |XXX/ | \ /XXX| \XXX
XX| \ /\ /XXX/ /XXX
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For some strange reason I've got well into ascii art... again... actually I know why it is: I came across some ascii animations of spiderman while browsing a forum and was so caught up with the possibilities that I thought I'd have to have a try. The above is from a beating heart animation available here.

I've submitted an animated gif of the webpage to dA and you can find it here, I used a similar technique on a piece of knotwork and you can find the deviantArt link here and the original here.

Well I was talking about XML a while ago...

The article in the Guardian that I quoted from some time ago seemed to say that XML came about from work done on SGML and HTML but that isn't strictly true...

What actually happened was that XML was developed from the same route language as HTML, namely SGML, so it's relationship to the other two languages is more like the illustration below:


+----------------------------------+
| SGML |
+--+-----------------+-------------+
| |
+--+---+ +-----------+-------------+
| | | XML |
| | +-------------------------+
| |
| HTML |
| |
| |
| |
+------+

SGML was used by Tim Berners-Lee as a basis for the development of HTML (HyperText Markup Language) while he worked at CERN and was looking for a way in which scientists working on diverse hardware platforms would be able to share data in a universally accessible format over the infant internet. HTML represents a subset of SGML but it shares only the first feature of SGML - in that it allows the same documents to be read on different systems. It is not formally extensible and it does not enforce specific rules. To some extent it might be said that SGML is the father of both HTML and XML but while HTML represents a subset of SGML, XML represents a simplified version of SGML.

Thursday 24 February 2005

XML's Birthday

Well the Guardian IT supplement announced that XML was having it's 7th birthday on 10.02.05... which is nice. What is also nice is how they're talking about everything being based on XML!

We know this because of SVG, a graphics format based using XML. I love SVG!

They (Simon Bisson) did get it a little wrong when they talked about the development of XML, "building on the work done with SGML (Standard Generalised Markup Language) and the web's HTML (HyperText Markup Language), XML was intended to be a common platform for data exchange accross the rapidly growing internet and become the lingua franca of the connected world."

Here's a link to the article.