Aule Browser

TiddlyWiki in Curl?

2011-08-02T12:21:00.006-05:00

I have been looking at what is new in server-side TiddlyWiki's at both tiddlyspot.com and tiddlyspace.com where there are many choices.

TiddlySpot offers a d-cubed template for GTD but TiddlySpace might be the better bet to run on my own server.

I have three links:

Each TiddlyWiki can be saved as an HTML file so this should be something that Curl could implement far more effectively without the reliance on JavaScript and CSS.

* a TiddlyWiki is a very light-weight personal wiki for notes, outlines, GTD or collaboration or ...

HTML5 tags, metadata and microdata

2011-07-25T16:12:00.003-05:00

I moved the JavaScript-enabled XHTML+RDFa home page for Aule Browsers to HTML5 today. About half of the Dublin Core metadata was lost in doing so, as was Common Tag for Freebase. All that was gained was the addition of Schema.org microdata.

Whatwg.org appears to have little sympathy for RDF where it is used. There is a tendency to mistake RDF for one implementation in XML. Is that the source of this conflict? I see very little sign that Schema.org and microdata are a step towards the semantic web - and HTML5 itself offers as semantic markup such gems as "section" and "article".

The present deficiencies of the types offered by Schema.org seem to reflect geek mentality. poem is missing. Language sprawls across natural language and programming language. Just find a peer-reviewed linguistics article that argues for Python as a language and which article is then referenced with approval by a linguist ranked in the top twenty in that branch of science in a published book on his or her own specialty. Oh, yes, "semantics".

Just try to start a dinner conversation on a blind date with a non-geek with

def nonsense()
WHITESPACE WHITESPACE pass

Pass the salt?

Where is that Pimsleur CD for Perl, lingua franca of the web ...

Sorry, but was that the punch line, or did you leave off a parenthesis?
XML-me, I missed a bracket when I removed lint from my one sport jacket.

That w3.org is not in the grip of Microsoft is no great consolation if it now guided by Google. I mean,
(Google + (Bing + Yahoo!)) or, in summation, search for content trumps content.

My vote is for rich content; let the search engines be the ones who play catch-up.

Aule Home Pages

2011-01-24T09:01:00.002-06:00

I started a separate Aule Pages blog for the home pages that I have begun to build at pages.aule-browser.com

A home page is an "aule" when it is designed as a starting-point or entry-point.

The first aule offered will be free home pages intended to be useful templates for people interested in poetry.

These aule pages will be followed by pages for science and then for philosophy.

The simplest pages will be in HTML with richer pages in HTML + JavaScript and the richest pages will be built in the Curl language from www.curl.com

Once an aule page is built, it can be used from a local PC or netbook or copied to a useful place on the internet. If it is added to an internet site then it is available to you when you are on a public PC at a library, for example. Whether it needs to be on a secure server on the internet will depend on its content.

Dance ruse and "Danse russe"

2011-01-17T09:38:00.009-06:00

I am now feeling some closure over my reading of "Danse russe" by Wm Carlos Williams as I awoke this morning with the realization that 'n' in the Greek alphabet resembles our 'v' and so gives "lovely" for "lonely", thereby clinching, so my satisfaction, the poem draped as Venus Kallipygos.

And I am amused to think that the "ditty" points to Aphrodite.

But all is lost if the flame-white disc is not the full moon on the shining trees, high only late in the night, and not visible from a north room in New England, the silken mists alluding to Selena's raiment, daughters and daughter of Titans.

The poem restored, the Venus restored, the year 1917.

A less grotesque reading may be Stavinsky and Diagolev with Nijinski in the white shirt or "vest" [Russian 'B'] as seen in "Петрушка: scènes burlesques en quatre tableaux" by Stravinsky of 1911. But note that Nijinski's utter lunacy dates to 1919. The yellow drawn shades might suggest something thought tawdry in New England.

But why "against" the shades? A hint at curtains, drapings? And here I thought I had reached closure in this one reading ...

He admires his arms first, for they are raised above his head - but he speaks of his face, not the shape if his head [ the Venus Kalli. copy was found without a head, so I imagine the head draped, but he offers his face - a man whose head might be found so well-shaped.]

I find no clue in the use of "Kathleen" - nor in álainn or uaigneach although one might imagine a clue in ομορφιά or in красавица. unless Kathleen hints at theogony, Θεογονία, which leads into an amusing tributary to Zeus and pater familias.

It is after all a dance in a year when so many will not return to Russia from Paris - but how late in that year 1917 was it written? Already he is discussing the book in a letter to Marianne Moore in February of that year {Feb 21]. When did he receive galleys? The collection, AL QUE QUIERE appeared in what month? And which poems had first appeared elsewhere?

A. Walton Litz and Christopher John MacGowan note that Ballet Russes were in New York in 1916 with Nijinsky dancing. They note Kathleen as the nursemaid to his children.

The poet does not say "make of these what you will" - you must want the poems.

see also: 'The embodiment of Knowledge'

regarding publication: see his letters; the publisher; critical notice or other notice

note: "Danse Russe" is in William Carlos Williams/selected poems as edited by Robert Pinsky.

Such a simple thing, awkwardness embedded in its very midst, and yet if wanted, rewards and rewards yet again.

poems poesis

2011-01-10T11:32:00.001-06:00

Started an new entry point or "aule" for poems.aule-browser.com at poems-poesis.blogspot.com

Some of the poems will be in minimalist HTML and some will be presented in the Curl web content language from MIT, (a multi-paradigm language with a free browser plugin, some open-source projects, but otherwise a web technology now owned by Sumisho.)

Husserl Encyclopedia Britannica article (1927) in German

2011-01-09T19:09:00.006-06:00

There are now two versions of Edmund Husserl's 1927 Encyclopedia Britannica article over at phil.aule-browser such that both require the Curl plugin for the browser but one uses a layout for a student of German.

This is accomplished while using the same text as input to both pages.

Each page is formatted as a single {article } which includes several texts each wrapped as a {para } within that one article, e.g.,

  {article
   {para [Husserl paragraphs] }
   {para [further Husserl paragraphs] }
   [ etc ]
  }

What is different between the two pages is how {para } is declared. In the one case it is a simple
{paragraph } and in the other it is

   {paragraph text-preserve-whitespace? = true }

The reason this makes such a difference in the presentation of the text is that each sentence is ended with {ln }

{ln } is a text format defined by me to do nothing in the one view, but to separate sentences in the other view.

The result is presented using inverse indentation as in:

This is a difficult sentence in German by Husserl

which uses jargon or unusual terminology

or has convoluted syntax or otherwise curious semantics.

This is a another difficult sentence in German

which also uses more jargon

or which also has convoluted syntax or otherwise curious semantics.

In a site-specific browser for philosophy students the intent would be to offer translation options and annotations.

The source text itself remains very readable in its own right due to the minimal markup in that shared source text (which is loaded into each page with an {include "name-of-text-file.scurl" } procedure.)

Neither page permits text selection by the user or source inspection of the code as a European web site claims to have a copyright on this text.

Mercury markdown

2010-10-15T18:58:00.000-05:00

I am quite taken with the Mercury .m files made available by Ralph ("Rafe") Becket at his cs.mu.oz.au page.

This seems to me to be much preferable to such things as pseudo-XML (markdown using no 'end' tags) as I remain taken with the style that I first knew in PDC Visual Prolog.

It doubtless comes down to a matter of taste.

For formatting poetry, everything depends on the context: is the page served from a remote site or is it local (the most 'local' being more content in a TiddlyWiki page, I suppose.)

My next task is to get back to Zope and Zope/Plone to assess the ease of text formatting there.

In passing: a very silly cross-library search at a University on 'Frankenthaler' could not split the art content from the cancer/physiology/medical content - not even by a range of Library of Congress identifiers. So some are a long ways from the semweb no matter how wide their searches may reach.

Swiki localhost for AniAniWeb as a personal home page.

2010-09-27T10:22:00.009-05:00

AniAniWeb strikes me as a natural evolution of WikiWikiWeb.

But as a personal homepage, the Squeak Smalltalkers seem not to have tested on a mere netbook which is not itself running an SMTP mail server.

The reason that I note this is that setting up this Wiki as a home page requires that you simply login as 'admin' with a password of 'password'. Create your wiki. But now try to use that swiki (read: edit those pages!)

The packagers did not realize that to edit, you must login, but to login you must be a user and that you can only become a user through responding to an e-mail with an e-mail. But this is localhost on a netbook. Ahem.

It would all be easy if they had admin:password as the values for a default user in a default XML file. And that is in fact the solution that I offer here: place a file named 1.xml in the users folder of the default folder.

It is charming to observe that for starters almost any garbage sufficed, because the swiki will attempt to re-write the file. If sufficed to find which file placed where would cause the swiki to fail. And browsing the Smalltalk code helped. This is usually not a sign of secure software! Without going through the amusing details, here is what will suffice:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8" ?>

<user name="admin">

<settings>

<s name="password" type="text">password</s>

<s name="address" type="text">yourname@yourmail.com</s>

<s name="sendAlerts" type="boolean">false</s>

<s name="showModified" type="boolean">true</s>

</settings>

</user>

Note that mail alerts are turned off, so the required email can be bogus.

N.B. do not save the file with a BOM (on Windows set the file's encoding using an editor such as Notepad++)

Linux Curl

2010-09-19T08:58:00.000-05:00

If you try the logiquewerks.com Curl pages from the aule-browser.com home page while on a linux desktop, here is a tip:

after you start, if a Curl Control Panel widget is cluttering your pane of active desktop applications, then right-click that Curl Control Panel 'button' and select an option to move it to some other workspace. That will leave the Curl Control Panel over on the comparable pane of that alternate workspace.

The Curl Runtime Engine (RTE) will still be running, but the widget will not be cluttering your pane of active window buttons on the parent window of your preferred or current workspace.

This sort of annoyance may be gone in Curl 8.0 (I hope.) Even in Microsoft Windows, it should have been an option, not an imposed feature. In some ways it makes telephone support of users easier, as in: "Do you see your Curl icon on your ..."

desktop clutter

2010-09-17T04:33:00.005-05:00

One of the best features of a recent Firefox browser is the Prism plugin.

Prism can be used stand-alone to create icons on your desktop which are just a favourite web page. That page opens almost as if it were an application.

The Firefox plugin for Prism adds a menu item to Firefox so that any useful page can be saved to your desktop as a Prism quasi-application.

But this has limitations. Take Qtask.com for instance.

Back when I was doing UI's for Win32, I learned to set my Windows application default for backgrounds to non-white: I use a mossy-kind of olive drab. This color shows up in the background of any application which neglects to offer a default background or a background choice. The qtask.com web site is like that, so I use a user script in my Opera browser and a GreaseMonkey script in Firefox to flip that background to a pleasant "linen" color with

document.body.style.backgroundColor = "linen";

Easy.

When the web page is "sent" to the desktop, the user script option is lost: Prism's virtue is in being a minimalist browser - more a vassel or varlet than a butler or person-Friday.

But even if you could still run your own script to set a desktop web page to your own liking, the end result is not a home but a midden: desktop clutter and a hades of folders within folders.

This is what brings me to evolving Aule: the changes are to what is to count as my entry point, my aule, or your portal or her mashup.

Services purporting to offer home web pages seem to always fall short here: Yahoo's My Yahoo is one of the worst.

A bit of client-side persistent data is likely as not also not the answer: I want my "home page" to be available from my travelling netbook, my mobile and my sedentary PC.

So what would a browser of prospective entry points - aules - be like?

It would know how to preserve my preferred entry points and my privacy - as any private entry to a home should do.

My first set starts with the coming release from beta of Tcl 8.6 and TclOO for Tcl/Tk. I have started by revising the link to a Tcl aule at logiquewerks.com.

Over the coming days and weeks the aules for Tcl, Ruby, remote astronomy, Fredericton, poets and such will offer a default HTML entry, a scripted entry and three Curl options - one being a browser widget on Windows IE, one a desktop app and one as a Curl applet in most any browser on most any platform.

There are a few Curl open-source projects that will facilitate building a web page that will help a user arrive at an entry point other than a browser "home page". Some will want a 3-D aule with video and audio and some will want bread-crumbs that persist and some will want side-bars and gadgets.

In some ways this is also where IE 9 on Vista and Win7 is headed - but that is no help when I head out the door with my linux netbook or just my iTouch.

And in time it should lead to the demise of this blog as it, too, is in the wrong place and in the wrong format and does not show me what I need to know (a comment has arrived or a link has gone stale.)

My "home page" should be my entry point - simple, clear, visible and on my path. And maybe more cluttered on a Saturday morning but elegant before midnight. This is do-able.

Here You Have

2010-09-13T09:51:00.003-05:00

The news reports that the "here you have" virus brought down servers at both NASA and Comcast should have IT managers looking at why employees have open access to web mail in their workplace web browser.

The aule-browser page on restricted email access begins at a logiquewerks.com page because open access to web mail is often also an open exit for confidential corporate content.

Given that Comcast's own customers run a variety of web browsers, there is no good reason for Comcast to use anything other than their own custom employees-only browser in-house.

Employees tasked with validating customer issues with generic web browsers on the open internet never need to perform those tasks while on the corporate intranet or to run on hardware or an OS which accepts user USB memory sticks as valid storage devices. The helpdesk practice of using one PC for both internal tasks and external web validation involves a failure to invest in security. In the early days of PC computing this was not the case in large corporations where 3270 terminals were still in use. Having participated in the introduction of 3270 emulation with early departmental networking, I remember this situation very clearly.

Today an astute employee running Firefox or Opera as their corporate browser can use "user scripts" very effectively to mask his or her activity from the sight of any cubicle visitor so a casual management approach of "keeping an eye" on your staff will not suffice.

The shibboleth of "web-enabled" should never have meant the expensive choice of allowing free entry across "free" web browsers and "free" web mail. That cost has been far too high for too long.

Fredericton, NB re-location in progress ...

2010-08-19T08:45:00.001-05:00

We are slowly settling into Fredericton, New Brunswick after 15 years in the USA. Optical fibre to the door in not yet available here along the St John River so far west of downtown, so back to DSL with Bell Aliant after a few days wait (their tech arrived at our door in a t-shirt with no id: very helpful and very Canadian.)

With the release of ObjectIcon 2.4 and a new alpha of Rebol3 pending, there will be new features in the generation of custom Aule home pages and Aule site-specific browsers.

Python Aule updated as Curl Browser

2010-07-22T19:23:00.001-05:00

Over at http://www.aule-browser.com/Python/ the custom Python browser has had an update.

Each component is generated from a list of features that could be declared in Curl (as it is now) or JSON or XML or other (Rebol, Icon, Logtalk, Oz.)

The buttons on the 'menubar' and the 'toolbar' now know how to set their roll-over tip and to update the status bar. Much of the information is declared in typed enumerations and implemented as constructed procedures of type proc in Curl.

The browser requires the Curl Surge runtime and notes on that can be found at either www.logiquewerks.com or at www.curl.com or at the aule-browser.com home page.

As a dialect there is more to do: leverage macros and remove the distinction between action and browse which pre-dated the current approach.

A tagged set of URL's would now suffice to layout a basic custom browser or a desktop applet with a constrained set of navigable links.

Ovid Amores in literary markup using the Curl web-content language

2010-07-09T19:35:00.003-05:00

I have refreshed the page at http://poems.aule-browser.com/ so that this simple formatting of Tony Kline's translation of Book 1 of Ovid's Amores is utf-8.

The markup is basically

{line
Just now, I was preparing to start with heavy fighting
}

as in

{poem
{elegy-id Book I Elegy I}
{elegy-title The Theme of Love}{br}
{br}
{line
Just now, I was preparing to start with heavy fighting }
{br}
{line

although the breaks could be placed within the {line } text formatting procedure.

Running multiple Curl applets within a single HTML page

2010-07-03T16:52:00.005-05:00

Over at http://aule-browser.com/multi-curl/index.htm I have placed an example of running more than one Curl applet within a single HTML page.

Each applet is an object element placed in one of two div elements within the main div of the page's body element. I might has easily have used the same applet twice if suitable input fields or controls were present.

One possible use if for the second applet to be used by a manager or auditor to make note on the use, content or features of some other applet within a single web page.

Astrophotography in Curl markup: M13 (NGC 6205)

2010-06-21T13:09:00.003-05:00

Over at aule-browser.com/astro there is now a page for Hubble's terrific M13 image.

This use of Curl markup involves embedding the image in a wrapper frame to ensure that it remains centered in a black background within a silver window.

The image - a JPG - is loaded only after the page appears in the browser, but the code to do so is very simple.

The class used is ImageGraphic and the key property set to "true" is that for preserving the image aspect-ratio.

This first page is using a 600px X 600px image. Smaller and larger options with a resizeable frame will follow.

This magnificent star cluster is overhead in the northern hemisphere well-before midnight at this time of year (the first weeks of June) and can be spotted with a small telescope or good binoculars sometime after Mars and Saturn have set in the west. Look for Hercules overhead between great orange-red Arcturus (follow the handle of the dipper in an "arc to Arcturus") and the great bright blue-white Vega. Arcturus will be a bit west of the azimuth (the sky directly overhead) and Vega a bit east. The core of Hercules is said to look like a "keystone" - but I see a flower pot. M13 is found in the westerly long "side" of that asterism.

To see individual stars rather than a grey cloud you may have to "look off the fovea" - so don't look AT the fuzzy object, relax and just "see" into the dark near the nebula: suddenly you will be aware that the fuzzy thing is stars - but as soon as you look AT IT they vanish into fuzzy grey. Steady now! Try not to stare! Or get access to a 10, 12 or 14" SCT or other reflector telescope.

Remember: you are not after magnification, but optical resolution and more light! Otherwise, there are always these magnificent Hubble astrographs.

Confidential Document Print Suppression in Curl applets

2010-06-17T07:16:00.001-05:00

Over at developers.curl.com I have added a blog post on preventing the printing of material presented in a Curl applet.

One simple technique given in that example is to exploit the media attribute of the CSS style element.

I have a more elaborate working example of suppressing screen capture at LogiqueWerks.com where the user is mouse-and-keyboard constrained.

Dealing with actual camera capture of text material is another matter, but if the user hopes for quick transfer of a snapshot to PDF and then extraction with OCR, you can impede that by an overlay or a background. In the case of Adobe, including marginal text in tiny font wrecks havoc with its text generation as does a zero margin with a visible border in a thickness near that of the letter "I" or "l". An overlay with graphical lines is also somewhat effective in defeating OCR.

After that, anything eye-only is only as secure as the person viewing the material - in the presence of your lawyers and without cellphones, computing tablets and Q.

Poetry markup with Curl: {poem {stanza } {stanza } }

2010-06-06T12:08:00.001-05:00

I have posted a note over at bytes.com on using the Curl web-content language for poetry markup.

Poem markup is very simple and elegant in Curl - and leaves you with a readable text.

Some of my examples are at poets.aule-browser.com

ActionScript3 TextField

2010-06-02T17:27:00.001-05:00

Over at http://as3.aule-browser.com/ I have been looking at ActionScript3 in SWF as a web-content language for text.

Text cannot be handled as it is in a Curl declarative-style file, but there are alternatives such as JSON (which Curl also handles well.)

The first challenge was in alignment of text: if a TextFormat is applied across only a range of a piece of text, the Flash TextField alignment, margins and indents break in peculiar fashion.

Anything that will use word-wrap should be multi-line with a TextFormat that is set with no range supplied.

The first thing you may miss are the Curl units which are not pixels.

If you build a Flex application instead of Flash (I am using FlashDevelop) there are other components available such as VBox, HBox and TExtArea much as in Curl.

It is hard to find anything to rival the Curl "live-code documentation" in the Curl IDE, but in the end the glitches ironed-out wrinkle-free.

facing pages as responses: a Curl e-book alternative for Le Messager européen

2010-05-29T13:11:00.004-05:00

In 1987 POL published a book in which the first chapter has many blank pages.

This is not due to illustrations, litigation or censorship: the text on the left-hand (even-numbered) pages from 16 through 70 (with the interesting exceptions of pages 15 and 72) are those of Heidegger as "interviewed" by Der Spiegel.

The right-hand pages (odd-numbered) 17 through 71 (and including 72), are the responses by Jan Patočka.

I will try to present this in a Curl format if I am able to obtain permission.

The book, Le Messager européen, is prefaced by Alain Finkielkraut.

My Curl e-book version would have alternative or even multiple responses - perhaps keyed to topics.

Pages which immediately suggest themselves for the right-pages are those of Hugo Ott or Victor Farias.

But there are also the pages of dissent: those of the Heideggerian faithful, the inspired, the devoted and the merely sympathetic.

Curl markup: marginal glosses for Galileo's Starry Messenger

2010-05-26T13:26:00.001-05:00

Over at http://phil.aule-browser.com/ there is now a link to a Curl markup of Galileo's Starry Messenger (or Sidereal Messenger or Sidereus Nuncius) of 1610.

The onerous task was restoring the marginal glosses. When the text of a volume at Wellesley College was scanned into Google Books, the resulting PDF is quite readable but slow to load and includes a text by Kepler. When text is extracted from the PDF, the result is a terrible mess due to the scanning of the marginalia.

The glosses are now restored using Curl markup with a custom definition of a text procedure {gloss } but they are not yet located in the margins next to the related text: they are in the margin immediately before the text.

Links to a few of the most significant glosses are at the top of the first page

The Curl runtime browser plugin (the Surge RTE) is required to view Galileo's text. The illustrations will be restored at a later date.

Marginalia and Text: glosses, scholia and annotations

2010-05-21T12:41:00.003-05:00

I was struck yesterday by a publisher's decision to place the chapter titles on each page of a hardcover book in the margins - running vertically. While this permits both margins and a few more lines per page, it almost prevents marginal notes. Running lines along the margins are still fine. Are they trying to impede handy scanning of books (marginal text plays havoc with rapid electronic scanning of text by-the-page.)

What has become less common is a summation of each paragraph or section in the margin (often in a smaller font) as scholia or glosses. Somewhat comparable are the Table of Contents with glosses such as found in Art and Its Objects by Wollheim.

Enabling annotation in e-book readers with a virtual keyboard are one thing: being able to assign a text to students with selectable levels of annotation is another. For some ebook readers, text highlighting may suffice.

Moodle has realized the importance of notes/journaling and replaced its limited journal module with its blog module.

Philosophy texts in HTML versus Curl

2010-05-13T12:49:00.005-05:00

Over at phil.aule-browser.com I have placed an exerpt from Hannah Arendt's The Human Condition side-by-side with an exerpt from Martin Heidegger's "Die Frage nach der Technik" which I find in the GA edition of Vortraege u. Aufsaetze.

This opposition is unsatisfactory is so very many respects: first, the lack of context. Secondly, the lack of immediate links to the contexts of the exerpts, not to mention translations. And why this selection? The parallel citations of Heisenberg are far more striking - suggesting to me that, although the volume is listed as in Arendt's personal library at the time of her death, she may have relied on the Heidegger citations.

Repeatedly, at critical junctures in essays by Arendt, I find turns of phrase which strike me immediately as both regrettable and Heideggerian. Time and again her polemical tone is his - the same chord, if you will.

That he cites no one for his great insights in his quote has a frightful parallel in Arendt (compare Jaspers earliest letters to her as a student.)

Two related posts elsewhere are

More detailed presentations of philosophy text can be found at phil.aule-browser.com

Philosophy text in Curl markup

2010-05-05T13:51:00.000-05:00

Over at aule-browser.com I have placed a German translation from 1909 of Henri Bergson's "Introduction à la Métaphysique" as "Einführung in die Metaphysik"

I will add a header page in HTML to select the viewing options for the text as Curl (http://www.curl.com/) markup.

Options should include pagination of translation, pagination of original, German italics, selected French equivalents and other links, comments and annotations as alternatives to the "plain text".

The same title was used by Heidegger in 1935 and the German version of the Bergson essay is interesting to compare and contrast to the pivotal Heidegger text.

I have not yet determined whether the German translation was in Heidegger's personal library.

I have tried to moot some of the issues related to markup over at http://eclectic-pencil.blogspot.com/2010/05/hubris-and-nested-markup-for-text-in.html

Curl International to merge with Sumisho (SCS)

2010-05-02T07:46:00.000-05:00

A news item in Japanese at http://curlap.com/ reports that at their April 28, 2010 annual meeting, Sumisho Computer Systems Corporation (SCS) announced that Curl International their wholly owned subsidiary, would merge into SCS.

Curl Corporation and Curl International were formed in 2004 following the Sumisho acquisition of the MIT spin-off Curl.

While tech journalists have been noting the issues between Apple and Adobe over the use of Flash, there tends to be little mention in the press of Curl as an alternative to Flash + HTML + Javascript + CSS.

Curl was developed at MIT as a web content language and is now used almost exclusively by Japanese corporate clients of Sumisho. An exception is the widespread use of Curl by corporate clients of Paisley, now owned by Reuters.

In 2009, Curl Corporation in Cambridge MA had relocated from the square at MIT to few blocks away and then had down-sized further late in the year. Curl Corporation should be unaffected by the merger.

Curl 7.0 was the last release of the Curl environment; several open-source Curl projects are hosted at sourceforge.net and code.google. SCS's focus on corporate needs may help boost work on the Curl external library project which would help site-specific web browsers in wrapping Apple WebKit, for example.

As an alternative to HTML + Javascript + CSS, the notable requirement for Curl, like Flash, Air or Silverlight, is the Curl runtime environment - either for desktop or as a web browser plugin. Curl had not developed a server-side solution and had failed to protect their trademark (Curl is often confused with haxx.se cURL.)

In the USA the corporate office of SCS in New York.

Joel on Software and UNICODE and HTML charset

2010-04-16T13:44:00.001-05:00

I wanted to post an note on the joelonsoftware.com page on UNICODE basics.

That page has a link to i18nguy.com which has useful pages linked.

My own habit is to use a variety of pages at fileformat.info such as the P-page and the S-page when I want a Pilcrow sign ( ¶ ) or the planet Saturn symbol or some such.

Some of my favourites are balanced quotation marks ( “ ” ) and a variety of foreign quotation marks ( »« ).

The reason for the quotation marks is so that when doing poetry markup in Curl I will not have to "escape" the keyboard dbl-quote character ( " ) which is used by the progamming language but which I don't want to use in text markup.

I seem to use the paired single-quotes ( ‘ ’ ) less often.

Here are German-style quotes: „Sein“ (will be better in a suitable font.)

Other favourites of mine are § Ç ß ä ö ü à é and ê ë è ï î ö ô along with Ä Ö Ü. The last characters should have been capital A O U with umlaut diacritics: if you see something else, you may have to change a browser VIEW setting for Encoding for your web browser.

If you are a Windows user who wants to copy and save these to a notepad cheatsheet, remember to save the file as UTF-8 on the SAVE AS menu. When you need an é in a hurry, holding down the ALT-key and typing 1 3 0 on the keypad and then releasing the ALT-key will place U-00E9 into most text.

IF you are a Windows user with an editor that which will not use displauy UNICODE with the default Arial Unicode MS font, well, there is always Notepad++ ... and it will allow you to save the file with or without the initial BOM bytes that indicate the encoding (which default notepad will not suppress.)

The minimal HTML header follows:

<html>
<head>
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8">
</head>

For more details, here is a char-encoding link.

Note: the above links have been set to open in a tab or window other than this blog page.

Sophocles ANTIGONE in Curl web markup

2010-04-15T14:15:00.000-05:00

At poets.aule-browser.com there is a first pass at marking-up Antigone.

This preliminary version uses fewer than 10 elements and could have been done with only five (5).

Subsequent versions will offer selectable translations, glossary, search, indexing and other features.

Curl as poetry markup: Friedrich Hölderlin

2010-04-12T20:28:00.000-05:00

The first pages of Hölderin in Curl markup are now available at http://poets.aule-browser.com/

These poems are formatted very simply using {poem } and within that {stanza }.

Some poems have alternate presentations as two columns of verse using
    {table {row {cell verses} {cell verses} }}

Because of the ease of formatting, most of Hoelderlin should be available in Curl format within a few days.

Most have indexing in the page by verse - again using a simple text format procedure: each stanza only requires a line at the top with a {sec num} such as
    {sec 5}
    {stanza
         a verse here
    }

Very little Curl know-how is required, but the aim is to provide a visual tool to select and edit a layout.

The real strength comes when adding in annotations and linking to critical materials. I will also being doing an MDI example with alternate translations of a poem in German, French, Spanish or Russian.

Heidegger and Cassirer

2010-04-07T10:09:00.000-05:00

Over at phil.aule-browser.com/truth.htm I have a series of links to Curl versions of an eText: Heidegger's "On the Essence of Truth" in John Sallis' English translation (the Curl RTE browser plugin is required to view these pages as an eBook.)

A more interesting version might juxtapose the Heidegger of 1929-1945 with Ernst Cassirer.

It is clear from the Freiburg Inaugural lecture through the lectures of 1930 and 1932 which comprise the 1943 "The Essence of Truth" that Husserl is not the target. Heidegger had effectively disposed of Jaspers of Heidelberg in his 1927 "Sein und Zeit" and may have imagined that he would dispose of Einstein in a second volume. The remaining target was Cassirer in Hamburg.

Cassirer's 1923 first volume of his "Philosophy of Symbolic Forms" opens with the concept of "being". That volume closes with what may be a clue to the Heidegger opus: "wisan". What we have here is not just a Heidegger pun on "Wesen" but a clue to Heidegger's language and philological idiosyncracies: only in emerging in the opening that is the historic "facing" (in my interpretation, the Warrior out of concealment, onto the field of battle or the lover emerging from her dissimulations in clothing, manner, attitude) that in victory or defeat we become known as what we were (the destined great nation, the destined lover, geworfen, geschicht.)

Another clue is in the Cassirer quote from Plato's "Sophist" on "koinon ton genos" when placed in contrast to "koinon genos" in Section 6 of the Heidegger essay with its emphasis on sophistry.

That Husserl is simply side-stepped should be clear from the 1943 publication blithely ignoring the Landgrebe edition of "Erfahrung u. Urteil" in Heidegger's short-schrift of any distinction of Satz and Urteil and his outrageous justoposition of Satz/Logos and later stated equivalence of "Aussage" and "Urteil".

Heidegger pun's should never be ignored any more than those of the wittier farceur, Sartre (Cassirer was known for his wit and prodigious memory.) When Heidegger choses to speak of "Umweg" in connection with his "Frage" we cannot ignore "Umfrage" and the more obvious "Abstimmung" and "Einstimmung".

Heidegger's erudtion in history of philosphy far outstripped that of Husserl and in the late 1920's and early 1930's he had listened to enough of Jaspers on his visits to Heidelberg to know where he stood. But in his years in Marburg, Cassirer had still been the legend (when Heidegger became Rector of Freiburg, Cassirer was still Rector of the new Hamburg University.) In terms of background in mathematics and science, Heidegger had only his brief exposure after he left dogmatic Catholicism (his later pronouncements on electromagnetic wave propagation on German television are trully laughable when you consider Cassirer's own books on science and specifically on relativity (on an equal footing with Russell and Reichenbach.)

Of course the critical confrontation with Cassirer comes later, at Davos, but tools for annotating philosphical texts could help to illuminate what would otherwise remain obscure.

David Frum on the iPad

2010-04-05T15:50:00.000-05:00

I posted this note over at his "forum".
The eBook mobile device has a few challenges: one is the rejection of commercial formats by the free-software movement. The MIT web formatting language CURL (www.curl.com) was spun-off as a company and so got no traction: but it offers a great deal more than PDF. It is more than just text and imaging: we need options to comapre versions/editions/translations and options to interpolate footnotes or side-pane footnotes and to link to eTexts from footnotes and options for our marginalia, notes and annotations. Microsoft OneNote 2007 on a netbook is about the best thing at the moment.

A thinking person's eBook viewer is NOT a web browser. I ahve some notes on the topic over at aule-browser.com

Other formats include Djvu, Daisy, JBig2, MobiPocket, Plucker

EPub is basically just a ZIP file

The Curl format is a much richer alternative to HTML5 or the Literature Markup Language due to the availability of macros and user-defined formats.

Another long-shot: www.rebol.com or www.rebol.net with the arrival of Rebol3

The most neglected way to index and explore text: ICON as in arizona.edu/ICON or ObjectIcon at code.google.com (from the folks who brought SNOBOL to the humanities.)

Schwitters' Gesetztes Bildgedicht in a Japanese variant

2010-03-22T14:43:00.000-05:00

Using the Curl browser plugin you can view this Japanese version of Kurt Schwitters' "Gesetztes Bildgedicht".

The selection of UNICODE Hiragana alternatives is my own.

Paul Valéry "Le Cimetière marin" (1920) as a simple Curl {pre } block

2010-03-17T18:23:00.001-05:00

Over at the aule-browser site I have placed a simple example of a French poem (Paul Valéry "Le Cimetière marin") in a bare Curl {pre } block with a {paragraph } format on a Curl DefaultDocument page.

The Curl browser plugin is required to view the poem.

The Curl page itself contains the poem - it is not loaded as a selectable resource - and the page is locked in as UNICODE utf-8.

Copy via "copy-paste select" has not been disabled - which is problematic as the poem is in public domain in Canada but may be under copyright in the jurisdiction from which the page visitor is browsing.

As it stands, the poem is not presented so as to allow an "in-place" bilingual translation comparison stanza by stanza let alone a comparison of translations. A look-up lexicon is also not available as part of the page - say, by dbl-click on a word or line.

As it stands, no "in-page" annotations have been enabled.

There is a more complete presentation of the poem in Curl markup at the HTML home page for poets.aule-browser.com where several poets are featured.

Kurt Schwitters' "Gesetztes Bildgedicht" in Curl

2010-03-05T10:26:00.000-06:00

Over at the aule-browser site I have two Curl versions of Kurt Schwitters' 1922 visual poem.

The first is constructed of completely independent elements (excluding the enclosing frame) to facilitate an animated version.

The second is in slightly different Curl declarative style using the Curl border-spec option using instances of the BorderSpec class with each bordered internal frame. In one instance this proved problematic and an apparently empty "frame" had to be given a right border to simulate a left border on the adjacent frame.

If you flip between the two as browser tabs you will see some minor layout variation which ideally would vanish by wrapping a contraint library (as with Alan Borning's original ThingLab.)

Other alternatives would include the use of a Curl grid or a Table or any of the above in a non-declarative or procedural style.

Poem annotations browser for International Day of Poetry: March 21

2010-03-05T10:04:00.000-06:00

The usual thought is to take a generic browser and add a plugin so as to have a useful feature such as an annotation. So you do that on your research PC.
Now you are sitting at the airport with your iPad. Oops, that was a Firefox plugin and this is Safari (your annotation content wouldn't have been accessible to you on the web anyway ...)

If there is a poet who demands annotations it must be the author of these lines:

And then went down to the ship
Set keel to breakers, forth on the godly sea, and
We set up mast and sail on that swart ship,
Bore sheep aboard her, and our bodies also
Heavy with weeping, so winds from sternward
Bore us out onward with bellying canvas,
Circe's this craft, the trim-coifed goddess.
Then sat we amidships, wind jamming the tiller,
Thus with stretched sail, we went over sea till day's end.

These lines, thus far, could be in HTML as ASCII text (although the font was to be something other than Monotype Bembo - which even this is not.)

Oh - this is not from Derek Walcott's Omeros.

But the poet in question sometimes included Chinese characters and classical Greek in his poems ...

HTML 5, Curl and presentation

2009-10-30T15:04:00.000-05:00

I thought it might be helpful to post the "tags" used as text-formats in the Curl language (at least those in the package CURL.GUI.TEXT-FORMATS)

Curl also allows the creation of user-defined formats, text-procedures and macros so the power of Curl for markup and markdown goes far beyond these expressions.

HTML 5 is expected to drop so-called "presentation" elements such as those using the tag "br". CSS and possibly XSLT are required to achieve such simple text formatting for "presentation".

In Curl, text itself is treated as a Visual object and with Curl 7.0 additional classes and expressions were added to strengthen this alternative one-language approach to presenting structured content whether in the browser or in a desktop application.

The 6.0 version of the text-formats can be found on-line at developers.curl.com (click "show" in the upper-left corner of that page to open the full browser view.)

The Curl 7.0 list of text-format tags follows:

big
blockquote
bold
br
browse-url
bullet
cell
center
copyright
default-browse-url
definition
definition-list
degrees
destination
elaborate
em-dash
en-dash
enumerate
full-copyright
full-rte-copyright
header-cell
header-row
heading
hrule
huge
image
italic
item
itemize
left-justify
line-through
link
marker
monospace
no-break
numbered-heading
page-break
pre
quote
registered-trademark
right-justify
row
small
subscript
superscript
table
term
text-part
tiny
title
trademark
underline

In the above list "link" corresponds to the HTML "a" anchor tag.

{text-part some text of ours} is particularly interesting as an example of the difference between the Curl approach and the X/HTML approach to web content. When the expression is evaluated by the Curl runtime engine, a Visual object is returned which can then be passed into other expressions, macros or procedures.
In those contexts, the .add method - common to all descendents of Visual - can be used as a common protocol without concern whether the original string content was a String, a StringBuf or other type of text object, as in

set sample-visual = {text-part some string content of yours}
{some-action sample-visual}
|| comment: where in {some-action } we would find
{visual-parameter.add "more content"}

Curl 6.0 added a library for separation of style-sheets and Curl 7.0 incorporated this into the default packages so that each of the above elements can be styled just as one would use CSS to style HTML.

In addition to text-formats, Curl includes text-procedures such as {text } and {paragraph } and a wide range of predefined paragraph-formats. Further, the standard libraries include {TextArea }, { TextFlowBox } which go beyond markup Visual objects to being full-blown GUI widgets (Graphic objects) such as usually would require JavaScript or the like and which respond to UI events such as mouse clicks.

Métis Aule takes first step forward

2009-10-23T15:12:00.000-05:00

Work has begun on a Métis aule-browser to provide an aule browser devoted to topics relating to Canada's Métis nation.
Les travaux ont commencé sur un browser pour les liens Métis canadiens.

on-line Curl documentation for 'the gradual curve' and 'the gentle slope' for non-HTML, non-XHTML web content markup

2009-10-16T11:09:00.000-05:00

I thought I would toss out the web link to the on-line Curl docs since I am looking at Curl these days most often as web content markup 'with the browser applet included' but targeting the desktop instead of a browser. That link is http://developers.curl.com/userdocs/CurlDocs.htm

The IDE itself offers selectable, installable docs with 'live' code in them by using the Curl {example} macro, so that is a much better option. Or there is the Eclipse plugin at www.curl.com

Since I still read about HTML as a 'language' and HTML5 starts to approach Curl in features, it may help clarify things to look at the case of a programming language that is also able to be its own markup language without adding a DSL. And which allows easy addition of custom tags with context-sensitive behaviors (the terrific and delicious consequence of macros being in a separate package from where they are used.)

Now back to how best to generate Curl markup from Drupal (with occasional sorties into Django, Seaside, Wicket, Groovy, QuarterMaster and such ...)

And suggestions just to use XSLT are always welcome ;-)

The poetry of Curl macros, or, poem markup for the web

2009-08-27T13:02:00.000-05:00

Here is a snippet from an American poetry e-book on the web:

Stanza:

<div class="lg" ID="LG24">
<a name="L185"></a><div class="line" ID="L185">"In the name of all created,</div>
<a name="L186"></a><div class="line" ID="L186">Let us hear no more, my brothers;</div>
<a name="L187"></a><div class="line" ID="L187">Are we older than all others?</div>
<a name="L188"></a><div class="line" ID="L188">Are the planets in our way?"—</div>
<a name="L189"></a><div class="line" ID="L189">"Hark," said one; "I hear the River,</div>
<a name="L190"></a><div class="line" ID="L190">Calling always, night and day."—</div>
<a name="L191"></a><div class="line" ID="L191">"Forward, then! The lights are shining,"</div>
<a name="L192"></a><div class="line" ID="L192">Said the Watcher by the Way.</div>
</div>

and here is my Curl macros alternative markup:

{para
{ln L185, In the name of all created,}
{ln L186, Let us hear no more, my brothers;}
{ln L187, Are we older than all others?}
{ln L188, Are the planets in our way?"}
{ln L189, "Hark," said one; "I hear the River,}
{ln L190, Calling always, night and day."}
{ln L191, "Forward, then! The lights are shining,"}
{ln L192, Said the Watcher by the Way.}
}

even better:

{stanza 24 lines 185-192
In the name of all created,
Let us hear no more, my brothers;
Are we older than all others?
Are the planets in our way?"
"Hark," said one; "I hear the River,
Calling always, night and day."
"Forward, then! The lights are shining,"
Said the Watcher by the Way.
}

Now is the markup in the way of the content when you have to look over the output?

There ia an interest group devoted to Curl markup for the Semantic Web over at developers.curl.com - just register as a developer member to join.

cl1p.net and cl1p.com for aule-browsers

2009-08-23T15:17:00.001-05:00

There appears to be no prospect for working with cl1p web clipbooks long-term, so for our external web note-taking (not notes within Curl CSPD) we will re-visit the Evernote API (similar to Facebook.)

Curl and Drupal project at developers.curl.com

2009-08-12T19:47:00.002-05:00

[We had a Drupal CMS project for the Curl web-content language over at the former developers.curl.com but the project is, as of August 2011, in abeyance.]

The existing Drupal framework uses HTML, but Drupal seems not as tightly coupled to HTML as other frameworks which otherwise pay attention to loose-coupling (the assumption that HTML is the only web-content language is rather like the assumption that RDF for semantic web is XML. Yes, it is one language ...)

Of course Python's Zope/Plone with its REStructuredText might be a better match to Curl. I am disappointed to see how some web frameworks are HTML to the bone: they would worry if that was so for XML. But XHTML does not seem to raise a concern. I now know how the Yaml folks must feel with all the attention to JSON. One exception so far: the old Http2View for Squeak Smalltalk looks easy to convert to Curl.

I was amused today to see some concerns about those myriad SOL files that Adobe FLASH and AIR like to stash away on our personal computers ... what I don't need are all of the directories for web sites I have not yet (yet? ) visited ...

Drupal at cms.aule-browser.com

2009-08-08T14:07:00.000-05:00

I have begun to explore the prospects of creating Curl templates using PHP and the Drupal CMS at cms.aule-browser.com

Curl is the web-content language from www.curl.com

Curl is very well-suited to the collaborative creation of corporate training materials for WBT and CBT (web-based training) using web or desktop applications with client-side data.

Smalltalk at Aule-Browser.com

2009-08-01T16:02:00.000-05:00

The Smalltalk links at aule-browser.com now display as shown above.

All this (30 links) for a language considered by some IT pundits to be either dead or MIA ( and this without many Seaside links such as dabbledb.com, seasidehosting.st, Swazoo, Sophie ... )

The Curl runtime is required to visit the Smalltalk Aule. The configuraion with the buttons on top is just one default. The Curl RTE (Runtime engine) is required to use Curl applets and once installed, aule-browser.com should be added in the Curl Control Panel as a trusted site (using the Add Host button on the Security pane.)

Two new Aule opened today: Prolog and AADD

2009-07-24T19:15:00.000-05:00

Today an Aule on the Prolog logic programming language opened at prolog.aule-browser.com

At the same time we opened the informative Aule for Adult Attention Deficit Disorder. An Aule browser is intended to facilitate organized note-taking: we will be extending this Aule to make it suitable for tackling the 27 issues outlined on its opening page.

Watch for Aule browsers for advancing Alzheimer's, varieties of Autism and Asperger's and for memory deficits associated with CHT (closed-head trauma.) The latter is especially significant for returning servicemen whose body armor allowed them to survive concussive blasts consistent with long-term CHT issues.

How To Aule now at howto.aule-browser.com

2009-07-22T14:22:00.000-05:00

We now have a How-To Aule at http://howto.aule-browser.com

We include the sites

http://www.wikihow.com/Main-Page

http://howto.wikia.com/wiki/Main_Page

http://howto.wired.com/wiki/Category:Computers

http://www.ehow.com/

http://www.howtodothings.com/

http://www.howstuffworks.com/

http://www.wonderhowto.com/

http://www.how-to.com/

If you have a site to suggest, please contact me as robert AT aule-browser.com or post a comment here.

New Tcl Aule at aule-browser.com

2009-07-18T11:27:00.000-05:00

There are two links at the Tcl Aule that might interest anyone who ever used Tk with Ruby or Python: they are links to Tcl and RDF and also to the XOTcl IDE (XOTclIDE) which is modeled on Squeak Smalltalk.

new Python links at aule-browser

2009-07-17T15:44:00.000-05:00

The link at logiquewerks now points to a much more complete Aule example for Python.
Every button is now python specific. This arangement of button son bars is entirely arbitrary: it could be whatever you chose to generate for the occasion or need.

There is of course wxHTML in wxPython with various articles on the web about its use.

Aule Browser group at Yahoo! Groups

2009-07-16T09:35:00.001-05:00

There is now an Aule Browsers group at Yahoo! groups: aulebrowsers.

Here was the first message to members:

At the moment all of the browsers are built on a WIndows XP SP3 using Curl 7.0 and IE 8
The browsers are tested in Opera, FireFox3, Prism and Chrome but to work properly they depend on IE being set as the default browser.

More options should come with Curl 8.0

For information on very restricted browsers see logiquewerks. com

For inforamtion on the Curl EmbeddedBrowserGrap hic see

http://developers. curl.com/ userdocs/ docs/en/api- ref/EmbeddedBrow serGraphic. html

The simplest wrapper is just an invisible frame which could have settings to prevent following web links sent in e-mail, prevent viewing iamges or prevent copying images. A fully locked-down browser would not have an address field for URL's. Most of our effor tis on the extended browser for research using wikipedia.org and freebase.com

Click to join aulebrowsers

Aule browsers have a Google Group

2009-07-15T16:52:00.001-05:00

There is now an Aule Browsers Google Group at http://groups.google.com/group/aule-browsers

Aule browsers at gather.com

2009-07-15T16:27:00.000-05:00

There is now an aule browsers group at gather.com with the url http://aulebrowsers.gather.com/

New Aule Browsers: subdomain listings

2009-07-11T00:32:00.000-05:00

There is a new listing of Aule Browser subdomains over at the LogiqueWerks Aule Browser page.

Watch for news as note tagging proceeds for note2tag.com starting with the Wikipedia browser at wp.aule-browser.com

Note: to test the features of locked-down browsers (business internet browsers with restricted web access) it is necessary to add www.aule-browser.com to the Curl Control Panel's Security tab using the Add Host button (upper-right corner of that pane.)

Note: to install or run some Curl demo's it is necessary to add www.logiquewerks.com
In a corporate setting these URL's would be those of secure corporate intranet licensed for Curl packages. The alternative is to use only digitally-signed Curl packages. For security details, visit www.curl.com

Aule-Browser.com gets a new look

2009-07-10T11:36:00.000-05:00

Our Aule Browser site has a new look.

Trying to give HTML-only its due ... now to show what Curl can do ...

And subdomains are starting to take shape:

games.aule-browser.com for Rack-O!

lang.aule-browser.com for Rosetta Stone

mail.aule-browser.com

music.aule-browser.com

perl.aule-browser.com

python.aule-browser.com

ria.aule-browser.com

ruby.aule-browser.com

wp.aule-browser.com for Wikipedia

Work progressing on note-taking + Curl CSPD with cl1p.net

And CSPD is now built into the wikipedia browser at wp.aule-browser.com

sites.google.com/site/aulebrowsers

2009-07-09T17:31:00.000-05:00

As the title of this post says, there is now an information site for Aule browsers at sites.google.com

The first two pages have basic information on Aule Browsers for parents and for law offices.

Pages with information on other restricted access browsers will follow: for county jails, halfway houses, group homes and psychiatric day wards among others.

Aule Browser arrives at code.google

2009-07-03T07:06:00.000-05:00

There is now an opensource Aule Browser project on code.google.com

Areas to watch are generating Aule browser wrappers with the Seaside web framework and other templating and domain-specific language (DSL) and dialect issues for generating site-specific browsers (SSB) in the Curl programming language.

The Aule browser uses the Curl EmbeddedBrowserGraphic class and its related EmbeddedBrowserEvent class in a detached Curl desktop rich internet client application.

Curl is a mature and established client-side enterprise platform but as a web content language, Curl remains an alternative to HTML + JavaScript with separation from presentation style.