A lightweight semantic interoperability framework for countries and large organizations (and small ones)

This post is a summary of some ideas for a lightweight semantic interoperability framework It is mainly a composition of existing open standards to form a framework for organisations to be able to ensure that semantic and technical descriptions stay connected over time. The idea is to provide a framework that allows for an increasing semantic interoperability emerging over time without having a large centralized organisation defining vocabularies. Main points:...

December 15, 2010 · Peter Krantz

ODF approved as Swedish Standard

Without making a press release or public announcement the Swedish Standards Institute has formally approved ODF 1.0 as a national standard. Only the “SS” prefix in SS-ISO/IEC 26300:2008 give away the status of the document.

September 2, 2008 · Peter Krantz

The increasing number of concurrent browser connections

While I was catching up on the development of IE8 I found this over at the IE blog: In IE8 Beta 1 we also increased our per-server connection limit from 2 to 6. What this means is that in IE7 and below pages could only download 2 elements from a given server at any one time. Increasing that limit to 6 allows sites to download 3 times as much content in parallel, which should translate into faster page download times when bandwidth is available....

August 30, 2008 · Peter Krantz

Standards require reference implementations!

First, some people bash Microsoft for not implementing DIS 29500 (OOXML) in Office 2007. Then, someone discovers that OpenOffice 2.4 does not create proper ODF. (Update: The test procedure was wrong). And then, Microsoft announce that a coming Office service pack will add native ODF support to Microsoft Office ahead of OOXML support. And, South Africa appelas OOXML adoption. Will Microsoft Office 2007 become the first Office suite to support ODF?...

May 23, 2008 · Peter Krantz

Does your webserver give HEAD?

In the process of constructing a crawler that finds and checks PDF documents on a website I discovered a lot of sites that don’t return information for HEAD requests. A HEAD request should return the same set of HTTP headers as a normal GET request only without the actual payload. The typical response seem to be status 500 (internal server error) on a lot of IIS sites. So, now is a good time to check your own sites to see what you get back from a:...

April 17, 2008 · Peter Krantz

Microsoft Word 2007/2008 Interoperability

Opening a particular Word 2007 document in Word 2008 can yield this error: Seriously? Can’t Microsoft get their own implementations to cooperate better? And this has just been approved as an ISO standard?

April 15, 2008 · Peter Krantz

When "standards schmandards" could have been used for something else

I own the domain name standards-schmandards.com which I use for my accessibility blogging. Recent events have made me wonder if I shouldn’t use it to cover recent events regarding IE8 instead. Or, as Mark Pilgrim elegantly writes: Said the monk: If you give me non-standard markup, I will render it according to standards. If you give me standard markup, I will not render it according to standards. What do you do?...

January 23, 2008 · Peter Krantz

How the Swedish OOXML Vote Was Bought for $57,000

Sweden is represented in the ISO through the Swedish Standards Institute (SIS). This means that our country has one of the 100 or so votes. The member countries have had six months to consider if the Office Open XML (OOXML) format should become an ISO standard. In Sweden, SIS arranged a working group that have looked through the material. As you may know the OOXML format has been heavily criticized (by many e....

August 28, 2007 · Peter Krantz

Exporting Exchange calendars to Apple iCal over HTTP and WebDAV

Update: This code has been integrated and greatly enhanced in the rexchange project by Sam Smoot. Update 2: iCal in Lion supports Exchange and none of this should be required anymore. Having recently recieved a brand new MacBook Pro from my employer I needed to get basic things such as mail and calendaring working. We use Microsoft Exchange 2003 which is great if everyone is using Outlook. Since I work with various clients I am subjected to their respective firewall policy which typically only allows HTTP(S) traffic....

April 29, 2006 · Peter Krantz