Don’t call me DOM

I’ve been asked privately whether the code of spellchecker service run on the W3C site was available; it wasn’t, but now it is, along with tidy on-line and HTTP HEAD services code.

The spellchecker uses a fairly simple Python wrapper around aspell, that:  Read more... (298 words, estimated 1:12 mins reading time)

• allows to pick the language of the document being spell checked – ideally, this would be autodetected in the HTTP headers (Content-Language) and in the HTML document itself (with the lang/xml:lang attributes)
• presents the errors found, and optionally the possible corrections
• links to a different form (whose code hasn’t been released yet) to add words in the local dictionary

I needed today a way to create nice relative URI paths in XSLT. The point was, given a relative URI A foo/bar/toto, and another relative URI B baz/tutu supposed to be relative to the same base, calculate the URI path from A to B, in this case ../../baz/tutu.

Although it isn’t very complicated, I figured that other people may need this very same facility, since it’s a classical problem when using XSLT e.g. to build a Web site. Plus, I tried to make sure it would generate “nice” paths, for instance avoiding that the path generated to go from foo/bar/toto to foo/baz be ../../foo/baz instead of the simpler ../baz.  Read more... (144 words, estimated 35 secs reading time)

I have been busy lately deploying a tool that I (and others) had started to develop one year ago, and had been stalled since then, informally called Annospam; the tool allows to cleanse W3C Mailing List Archives from its huge number of spams they host and are likely to continue to receive, however clever our anti-spams systems are getting.

The idea is to use the Annotea protocol as a way to store and retrieve spam marks on archived messages, and to regenerate the relevant archives based on these marks; it uses lots of W3C Technologies (XSLT as a way to build a user interface, RDF/XML as a data format, HTTP as a query/update protocol), which makes it really interesting, if sometimes somewhat challenging.  Read more... (194 words, estimated 47 secs reading time)