Jekyll/Prose.io

so, healthcare.gov: github/Jekyll/prose.io, and this is the Agile NoCMS approach now, replacing drupal as a shortest path content for anything solution? Weird, wild stuff.

Time to talk about Single Page Applications again?

The phrase Single Page Application is possibly link-bait. It has certainly drawn more comments than any other post I have made, although many of them are in languages with which I am not familiar, discussing products and services about which the less said the better.

Back in 2009, if I referred to a Single Page Application, I was most likely talking about TiddlyWiki, and that has changed now due to the ever-expanding field of mobile development and popularity of HTML5; so that now, if I refer to a Single Page Application, I am more likely referring to a mobile application shell which uses client-side business logic and asynchronous REST to provide a rich user experience. A modern SPA will use a combination of MVW libraries and frameworks like Backbone, Marionette, AngularJS or Ember; wheras TiddlyWiki used a lot of well written sophisticated JavaScript.

My own experiments with Saxon-CE and JQuery in PhoneGap have been very enjoyable, in which case all of your business and presentation logic are bundled into XSLT2 stylesheets, with a very thin layer of Ajax, which really constitutes another framework. In this case, when you take PhoneGap away and replace it with a native web OS (Firefox OS), you are left with a very thin framework for SPA.

To return to the subject of my previous post, if I was to create a "book" as a single page application (and not just use EPub3), this is the sort of framework I would target, for exactly my previous reasons. So from that point of view, I'm very pleased with the way technology is currently evolving.

of words she's made up

speaking

of
words

she's made

up


and

waking
through

dreams

she's

breathing
alive

singing
through
songs

she's
sung

-ision

I'm going to get into this once, and then hope it takes on a life of its own. I believe it is important to put this down in words; how not to suck at things. Precision, concision, vision, decision. This is like asking "is this measurable, is this actionable?" But this is easier, I have found.

Precision
When you describe a thing, are you accurate? Are your facts correct?

Concision
Have you used ten words where five are required? Is your argument more complete when you say less?

Vision
Do you have a clear and compelling message?

Decision
Are you able to act on the information available?