Does AI mean we don't need the Semantic Web?


User: Read the following sentence: "Our opening hours are: Weekdays 10 until 7. Weekend 10 until 10 (Early closing 9 o'clock Sunday)." ChatGPT: The given sentence states the opening hours of a certain establishment. Here is the breakdown of the opening hours mentioned: Weekdays: The establishment is open from 10 in the morning until 7 in the evening. Weekend: On weekends, the establishment is open from 10 in the morning until 10 at night. Early closing on Sunday: On Sundays, the establishment closes earlier than usual, at 9 o'clock in the evening. Please note that this information is based solely on the provided sentence, and the specific establishment or its type is not mentioned. User: Is the establishment open at 2130 on Sunday? ChatGPT: Based on the information provided in the sentence, the establishment has early closing on Sunday, with the closing time set at 9 o'clock in the evening. Therefore, the establishment would not be open at 21:30 (or 9:30 PM) on Sunday.

If you hang around with computerists long enough, they start talking about the Semantic Web. If you can represent human knowledge in a way that's easy for computers to understand it will be transformative for information processing. But computers, traditionally, haven't been very good at parsing ambiguous human text. Suppose you saw this text written […]

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The limits of CSS styling select options


Checkboxes in a line.

Sometimes you learn the most from failures! I wanted a <select multiple> element where the <options> were laid out in a grid. I nearly got there. It's possible to have the <option>s in a horizontal row - but only on Chrome and Firefox. Here's a quick fiddle showing the results: As you can see, it's […]

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Responsive Yearly Calendar with Flexbox


A grid of calendars. One calendar item has moved to the next line.

This blog has a calendar showing my yearly archives. It was in a table layout - which made sense when I first designed it - but had a few spacing niggles and was hard to make responsive. Now, it behaves like this: The code is relatively straightforward. The HTML for the calendar looks like this: […]

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How to password protect a static HTML page with no JS


Screenshot of some garbled text on screen.

I recently saw Robin Moisson's method of password protecting a statically served HTML page. It's quite neat! But it does rely on JavaScript. That got me wondering if there was a way to encrypt a static page only using CSS? And... I think I've done it! I'll warn you now, this is a deeply stupid […]

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What's the most malicious thing you can do with an injected HTML heading element?


The HTML5 Logo.

A bit of a thought experiment - similar to my Minimum Viable XSS and SVG injection investigations. I recently found a popular website which echoed back user input. It correctly sanitised < to &lt; to prevent any HTML injection. Except… It let through <h2> elements unaltered! Why? I suspect because the output was: <h2>Your search […]

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Simultaneous Translation in HTML


The HTML5 Logo.

How do you show two languages simultaneously in HTML? If you want to show text in a foreign language, the markup is simple: <html lang="en-GB"> ... As Caesar said: <i lang="la">veni vidi vici</i> That says the page is in British English (en-GB) but the specific phrase is in Latin (la). But how can you offer […]

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HTML Ruby and Bidirectional Text


The HTML5 Logo.

The set of HTML <ruby> elements allow us to add pronunciation above text. For example: "When you visit the zoo, be sure to see the panda - 熊(Xióng)猫(māo)." This is written as: <ruby>熊<rp>(</rp><rt>Xióng</rt><rp>)</rp></ruby><ruby>猫<rp>(</rp><rt>māo</rt><rp>)</rp></ruby>. That is, the word or character which needs text above it is wrapped in <ruby>. The pronunciation is wrapped in <rt>. The […]

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Paper Prototype CSS


An HTML table - every element is askance.

Introducing Paper Prototype CSS. When I first started designing the OpenBenches website, I wanted to make it look deliberately crappy. I didn't want the people testing it getting too hung up on what it looked like. I've found that some beta testers can only focus on whether the colours are right, or if things should […]

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How should user comments be marked up in HTML5?


The HTML5 Logo.

This is quite the epitome of yak-shaving! Suppose you have an article written in HTML. The basic layout might be something like: <body> <main> <article> The content of your article ... Pretty standard. Now suppose you let users add comments to the article. I have two questions: Where in the tree should they go? What […]

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Semantic Comments for WordPress


The Logo for WordPress

As regular readers will know, I love adding Semantic things to my blog. The standard WordPress comments HTML isn't very semantic - so I thought I'd change that. Here's some code which you can add to your blog's theme - an an explanation of how it works. The aim is to end up with some […]

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