Bruce Whealton: Career, Interests and Values

A very useful video on the semantic web… What is the semantic web? Web 3.0? Enabling humans and machines to better communicate. Most of the web and knowledge out there is not meaningful in itself. A computer cannot understand what is on a web page. The semantic web seeks to create a language that will allow computers and software to understand the data that is represented, stored and displayed, or communicated. This is a way of giving meaning to the data.

Currently websites are displayed with HTML. This describes how to present the information, knowledge or data on the web. It doesn’t however define or describe what the data represents. For example, if I put up a web page that represents my resume. In typical HTML, I have tags that describe how to display the information. In the semantic web, using XML tags, I’ll be able to represent or describe the fact that the data represents a resume, my resume, about me. The challenge is to create a vocabulary, an ontology that will allow different agents, that is different computer systems (hardware and software) to communicate and understand this vocabulary. Think of the challenge of an English speaking person looking at a resume written in an Asian, eastern language, say Chinese.

Bruce Whealton

This is about the semantic web… where content has meaning, not just to humans but to machines – software. We are talking about knowledge, not just data. Web 3.0, the Artificial Intelligence web.

Home Style & Design Tabs & Slides

MooAccordion

Version

1.0.2 (last update on Aug 11, 2010)

Rating

« Rate this extension

Compatibility

Votes

3

Favoured 6

License

GPLv2

Non-Commercial

Type

Views

3495

Date Added

29 July 2010

Developer

Andrew Patton

Website

Website

MooAccordion makes it very easy to add MooTools accordion slides (show/hide blocks) to any article, which can be used to organize and display content more effectively (like in a FAQ page). The syntax is simple:

{mooblock=Trigger Title (used to trigger the slide)}
Content of the slide block…
{/mooblock}

Features include:

• adds minimal markup (and intelligently strips unnecessary markup added by editors like tinyMCE and JCE, if present) to keep the html clean and valid
• uses Joomla core MooTools library, which means this plugin adds no HTTP requests, minimizes dependencies, prevents JS conflicts, and makes it very lightweight
• adds CSS class for active block title, allowing you to toggle it’s icon (for ex, from a + to a – icon); more generally, the markup is fully CSS customizable
• very easy for anyone to use (without technical knowledge) and very flexible
• the show/hide effects and other settings are easily customizable from the plugin’s configuration

The plugin is similar to JoomlaWork’s Tabs & Slides (in content items) Plugin, the plugin I originally used before being inspired to write this one. My biggest problem with the JW plugin was that when I added the plugin syntax into an article, the plugin would create invalid markup from it, because the WYSIWIG editor automatically wrapped it in a tag. Also, it seemed foolish to use an old accordion script rather than the built-in accordion plugin that Joomla already comes with. This plugin solves those issues, and does so efficiently and robustly.

Note: the title can contain html if desired. If it is wrapped by one html element, that element will be used as the title toggler. Otherwise, it will wrap the title in a <h4> tag. Also, the title cannot contain ‘}’ or the plugin will incorrectly interpret that as the end of the title. Lastly, to create separate accordions, just make sure there is some kind of content (text, a non-breaking space [&nbsp;], an empty <p> tag, a <br />, etc.) separating the mooblocks.

Changelog:

—— 1.0.2 Stable [2010-08-11] ——
+ added support for creating multiple separate accordions in the same article
^ improved regex performance

Images

Reviews (1)

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Great Pluggin

byac524 on August 6, 2010

Roll downs work great, and he just fixed it to let you include multiple sliders on the same page.

Tip: You have to include a “.” between mooblocks for them to work right. To hide the “.” I simply wrapped it in a span and set the opacity to 0. Its a quick fix, but it works.

A nice tool for creating an accordion style user input on a website. This works with Joomla. If for example, you had a list of Frequently asked questions, you could use this to display just the title of the question and when the user clicked on a question, a panel would open up revealing the information. This is a great way to organize long articles or lots of information in an easy to use format.

Bruce Whealton

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Learning Drupal on Lynda.com training library. Drupal is a great tool for managing a website. Create dynamic websites that store content in a database and display it as requested. Drupal supports forums, comments, blogs, posts, pages, books, and much, much more.

This looks like an interesting way to share one’s ideas and knowledge in a variety of areas. I like this. Check it out.