Benjamin Novack Carlyle wrote another winning article about his view of the web's future. As usual he's quite insightful and some of his thoughts are inspring. In his most recent article, The Architectural Spectrum, he makes the distinction between large architectures (the Web) and small architectures (ones specific to a piece of software or organization).
One major thought of note is that he sees RDF as being intentionally(?) relegated to the place of an RDBMS or SQL replacement technology. I certainly see his point, and think he may be right. However, I am enjoying the promises that RDFa makes for embedding RDF data directly into XHTML.
As always, we'll see what actually happens.
A List Apart released a great article (or so I think, though it is "controversial" in the web community) discussing a clean (read standards focused) way of handling JavaScript behaviors.
The JavaScript Triggers article analyzes the current standards/symantec problem with incorporating event triggers in your XHTML. If you are working toward true separation of concerns (keeping logic, content, and style separate) this seems to be the way to go.
The author, building on this conclusion, demonstrates a method to creat custom elements in XHTML to use with JavaScript. He creates a "required" and "maxlength" attribute to use in form validation.
This works "out of the box" until you want to validation your page through and XHTML validator. To get around the errors generated by the new para-standard elements, the author shows how to create a custom DTD to extend the XHTML standard to support your new elements.
This is likely the way I'll be going with any web apps I build in the future. The approach makes the most sense when it comes to balancing separation of concerns on the client side.
A "checklist" of XML fundamentals has been created by David Stephenson of HP. It looks to be a good overall view of XML and the core related technologies.
I haven't read the whole thing through, but what I did read (mainly the part on URI's, URL's, and URN's) helped clarify some things I've been fussy on for a while, but haven't had the time to dig through all the docs out there to learn what I needed. Mr. Stephenson sums it up rather succinctly.
If you're interested in XML (et al), I would suggest using this as one of your starting points. It's not exaustive, but it's got the basics on more than just XML.
XFML hierarchical faceted metadata exchange standard
I just found XFML. From what I can tell it serves a purpose similar to TopicMaps but a bit more limited.
Drupal, which makes good use of taxonomies, exports to XFML.
If nothing else, it's at least one more thing to add to my "hey, this is cool! (meaning: might be useful someday)" list.