B. Mann Consulting

It's been quite some time since I wrote about purple numbers -- fragment identifiers for bits of text within HTML documents. Or, Granular Addressability in HTML documents as E.E. Kim describes in 'An Introduction to Purple'.

Back then, I wasn't a fan of these anchor links, as anchor links aren't first class web citizens -- where links are currency. I'm still not a fan, but maybe the anchor links are just there to make it easy to grab pieces of this content.

A recent reference by Les Orchard (oh, look, OPML anchor tags!) to purple-include, which enables transclusion (aka including content from elsewhere, directly inline, rather than copy/paste) got the brain cells tickling tonight. So I built a Purple module for Drupal. Which, in reality, just includes the purple-include.js and a little bit of CSS to make purple links show up. I am trying to include some of Simon Willison's plinks cleverness, but not sure if I'm going to get that working.

Transclusion feels very SemWebby. No, I'm not going to use the dreaded Web 3.0-label (but do go read the Business 2.0 article if you want a backgrounder (via Nova Spivack, of course). Ahem. Back to the point.

From Facebook apps to photos stored on Flickr, we want to have all our "stuff" just magically collected together wherever we happen to be, whatever network we happen to be interacting with. Aggregation, sucking this content in, pushing it over there -- all just temporary ways of flowing content around. One that arguably duplicates content and spews extraneous permalinks around. I just want my pictures right here, or I just want to link deep into someone else's posting and pull in a piece of text. And I want the "other end" to know about that inclusion, a gentle ping, yeah, kind of a trackback. That's the Semantic Web to me: where every plain old HTML file is dynamic and intelligent and knows about the links and people that are incoming and outgoing.

OK, now to Purple. Here's an example that includes a file I have on my server, shamelessly copied from the purple-include examples page. First the code:

And now the transcluded bit:

Update: Kevin reports that the transclusion doesn't work in Safari. Stupid client side technologies :P

Note: I don't *actually* know XPath. But if you open the file directly, you'll see it just grabbed the paragraph. I'm assured you can do more complicated things than that :P

To Do: #

• Find out where purple-proxy is hiding / what to do with it so I can transclude from elsewhere
• autogenerate plinks / pilcrows / numbers, perhaps via a Drupal filter
• make a real module available somewhere, maybe also tracking down jluster's old purple numbers code

Les' comment was too good to languish in the comments. Content management systems and blogs are now clearly at the "easy to self host level". How long will it take to be able to easily do the same thing with a Jabber server?

In the light of ongoing PHP wrangling, PHP is also likely not the best language to be writing that server in.

What I think would be a hot "Twitter killer" (successor?) would be something self-hosted like WordPress or Drupal. I've been idly thinking about this since I first saw the site, so my ears perk up when I see discussion like this :)

I think XMPP would be excellent for communication for node-to-node and user-to-node. The user-to-user case works for a private IM back channel, but even there it might help to have a web-based Jabber client and maybe a custom XMPP server with an archival plugin tapping in.

Another thing I've been wondering is what limitations XMPP might introduce in deployment cost in a cheap PHP hosting world where WordPress, etal thrive? How hard is it to run your own XMPP server, or is it really necessary? (I'm spoiled because I've either always had root on my own dedicated / virtual server, or shared a server that had a Jabber server running.)

Along with XMPP, though, I think a few other federation options might be handy. Optionally CC'ing to an account on Twitter / Jaiku / iStalker / etc itself via the API to keep looped into an existing community - dirty, but handy. Also, polling RSS / Atom / JSON feeds to "pull" updates for a friend subscribed on the self-hosted node who's not in the XMPP loop.

In any case, I think XMPP is an excellent foundation for a network of self-hosted Twitter-esque nodes. I'm just wondering what else needs to be layered on and how.

 Now go over and subscribe to the rest of Les' stuff -- you probably know him as decafbad.