Mark Birbeck

Passing run-time parameters to internet applications

Determining the behaviour of an application at run-time using parameters is a well-established practice. But whilst it's possible with command-line and server-side applications, the scope for passing information to client-side internet applications is limited. With the growth in internet-facing desktop applications, widgets and gadgets, there is a need to pass parameters directly to the application, rather than via a server, and this post looks at how that might be achieved.

The future of mark-up languages


This presentation by Mark Birbeck was given at the Kings of Code conference.

XForms Ubiquity

I just found out about a nice little XForms engine called Ubiquity. (Having dinner with Mark Birbeck, TV Raman, and Leigh Klotz certainly helps one find out about such things) :-)
It’s a JavaScript implementation done right. Open source under the Apache 2.0 license. Seems like a nice fit with, oh maybe MarkLogic Server? -m

Interview on Cubic Garden

Ian Forrester interviewed Mark Birbeck whilst they were both at XTech 2008. Subjects mentioned range from XForms, Ajax, Sidewinder, ODF, unobtrusive JavaScript, XUL, standards adoption, New Labour, Hegel's idealism, the Ajax Community, and the Ubiquity XForms processor.

Building Mobile Applications with xH


This presentation by Mark Birbeck was part of the Reinventing the Mobile Browsing Experience Through Ajax industry panel, held at WWW2007.

Ajax and progressive browser enhancement

There is still plenty of scope for the browser to evolve, but the truth is that progressive browser enhancement makes browser evolution far less significant than it has been until now. That's probably not a bad thing, given the chaos that is currently surrounding the development of HTML at the W3C.

Turn any web page into a desktop application

I've just finished implementing a new feature in the Sidewinder Viewer, which further simplifies the task of turning any web page into a desktop application. If invoked with a command line argument that specifies the document to load, the viewer now also checks the fragment identifier for the presence of a meta XPointer scheme. The expression associated with this scheme allows you to set a number of application-level properties, such as the window title, height, width, position and so on.