The next big task that I'm about to tackle on the Ubiquity XForms project is support for Safari and Chrome. In general, UXF has seemed to work pretty well in the WebKit-based browsers whenever I've tried it, but I've never run exhaustive tests.

Mark Birbeck's Tech Talk at Google, on RDFa, is now online

Recently I added an initial implementation of the navindex and accesskey attributes to Ubiquity XForms. Both attributes enable an XForms author to improve the navigation experience for their users; navindex by defining the order in which form controls are navigated and accesskey by defining shortcuts for navigating to particular controls.

One of the features of our RDFa parser (Ubiquity RDFa) is the ability to import RDFa from external documents. This is particularly useful for bringing in definitions for templates and other processing rules that you would like to have applied to the document being parsed, or for importing one definition into another (owl:imports is implemented this way).

The technique used to garner these triples is simply to import the external document into a hidden iframe, and then run the parser on it. However, as the JavaScript programmers amongst you will know, that only gets you so far; if the document containing the RDFa you want to import comes from a different domain to the one that your source document originates from, most browsers won't give you access to the DOM in the iframe.

There are all sorts of ways to try to work around this, and a common one is to use a server to convert the RDFa to JSON, since script tags aren't victims of the cross-domain limitation. We therefore decided to create a JSON format that was as close as possible to RDFa. Of course, since RDFa itself is a serialisation of RDF, then really we were actually looking to create a JSON format for RDF.

Just over a year ago I wrote a blog post that showed how to create a FOAF profile on a web page, using RDFa. The idea was not only to show how easy it was to do in terms of the markup, but also to illustrate that once you are able to publish RDF via a web page, you need nothing more than a blog page to join the semantic web.

This blog post updates that old post, by first adding some guidance on how to check your document (using the Ubiquity RDFa parser), and then proceeding to add more features to your blog page.

Determining the behaviour of an application at run-time using parameters is a well-established practice. But whilst it's possible with command-line and server-side applications, the scope for passing information to client-side internet applications is limited. With the growth in internet-facing desktop applications, widgets and gadgets, there is a need to pass parameters directly to the application, rather than via a server, and this post looks at how that might be achieved.

The Ubiquity library provides a range of open source components--from Ajax libraries to browser extensions--that work together to deliver a fresh approach to web application building.