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1776

In rewatching 1776, which I do around Independence Day every year, I am reminded of the writer, Peter Stone’s great bit for Lewis Morris, the delegate from New York…who spends the entire play remarking, “New York abstains…courteously.”

Finally, it is the character of John Hancock who finally loses his temper and asks him about it. Portrayed by Howard Caine in the movie, Morris admits that the New York Legislature has never given him specific instructions on anything. “Have you ever been present at a meeting of the New York legislature? They speak very fast and very loud and nobody listens to anybody else with the result that nothing ever gets done.”

Nothing much has changed in New York politics since 1776…or at least when Stone wrote the play in the late 60s. Stone also wrote the screenplay for The Taking of Pelham One Two Three(the original, not the horrible John Travolta remake), which also pokes a lot of fun at New York, as well as the 1997 musical(not to be confused with the movie) Titanic.

I actually repurchased 1776 this year on Blu-Ray. The new version includes an all-new commentary, an extended version, and some deleted scenes. I found this lengthy explanation of the various cuts over the years in the Amazon commentary. To summarize:

  • The movie premiered in 1972, approximately forty minutes shorter than the director’s original cut.
  • “Cool Cool Considerate Men” was cut after a negative reaction from the White House regarding the scene’s anti-conservative tone, studio executives agreed to remove eight solid minutes. So great was the pressure that the original negative and all known parts of the scene were destroyed. A search began for any version of the missing footage.
  • The restored film on the laserdisc was presented in the widescreen format and remixed for true stereo sound using the original multi-track units (in some cases as many as twenty-four tracks). It contained a total of 40 minutes of footage not seen since the two premiere screenings in 1972. Other highlights of the Laser Disc version were the full opening credits, newly incorporated character closeups and additional music for several songs. The running time was once again 180 minutes. The 1992 Pioneer Laser Disc Special Edition of 1776 was one of the most ambitious video restorations ever performed.
  • For the 2002 DVD release, the replaced footage was been repaired, giving the DVD a much cleaner look visually than the laserdisc, but the film was been shortened to 166 minutes.
  • Finally, in 2015, the director’s cut of 1776 has made its way to Blu Ray and it includes a “branching version of the movie” with both an extended and the director’s cut, which incorporate many of these missing moments mentioned from the Laser Disc,scrubbed up and restored to as pristine a quality as possible.
  • The Extended cut has everything that was on the Laser Disc except: Overture and Entr’acte created for the LD; Scene of Jefferson (sitting on a window sill in Congress) watching some children playing (rather patriotically) as a young girl looks back up at him and smiles; An extended scene (just after the conclusion of Yours, Yours, Yours): Instead of the blackout (that now occurs between scenes) there was one continuous scene showing the breaking dawn as Franklin arrives, after taking a piece of fruit in the marketplace, and finds Adams asleep on the stairs below Jefferson’s room while a lamplighter blows out a nearby streetlight; The underscoring to John and Abigail’s final scene [leading into “Compliments”] — though the underscoring to Franklin’s entrance has been restored.

On a related note, anyone want the DVD copy? I can give you a good price? And I just noticed the 42nd anniversary edition of Taking of Pelham 123 is out…with interviews with surviving production individuals, and the single surviving lead actor….think I should click? The one saving grace of Blu-Rays lately vs streaming are the extras they bring to the table, especially for classics. They keep rereleasing things with more material and trying to get me to buy it. They may succeed in this case.

Replied to http://stream.boffosocko.com/2016/david-this-is-some-excellent-code-for-adding-some-microformats (Chris Aldrich)

David, This is some excellent code for adding some microformats to @WordPress. Thanks @dshanske!

For those with less technical expertise, could I pose a few questions which you may or may not cover in part 2?

If I recall, there’s microformats version 1 and a more recent, updated microformats2. Most of what you’re adding here is the mf2 spec and not backwards compatible mf1 mark up, right?

When you say that a theme shouldn’t “style” hfeed or hentry, you mean that the CSS shouldn’t include these classes as they’re used only for semantic mark up and not meant to be used for CSS at all?

If hfeed is already added into a theme, do you recommend removing it from the theme code directly with search and replace (particularly if it wasn’t added in the correct place) and then adding it with the snippet you provided, or is it best to leave it in the theme and remove it from the code? If we remove it from the code you provided, which line(s) should we omit? What happens if it is duplicated (ie, what will the output look like, or what happens to parsers that read the code)?

What exactly are the post, body and comment class functions? What do they look like and where would one find them in a particular theme?

How is the code you’ve provided different from what the WordPress plugin uf2 does? Is it more or less extensive?

In the end, this is also just a stop-gap measure to quickly add a small, but high level subset of microformats to current themes that don’t support it? Ideally we would hope more modern themes will add a more full version of microformats natively?

  • Hfeed and hentry are classic microformats, and remain in this implementation. In most themes, hfeed is attached to a main div and should be removed in favor of the implementation provided. The advantage is that it can be modified.
  • CSS shouldn’t include microformats classes.
  • If you duplicate the same classes attached to different elements, it can mess up parsing.
  • Some of this is similar to the code in wordpress-uf2. wordpress-uf2 hasn’t been updated in a while and also uses ActivityStream as Microformats Vocabulary…h-as-page, h-as-article, which are not commonly used. This doesn’t include that. So, simpler, but taking advantage of changes in WordPress and Microformats.
  • This isn’t really a stopgap measure. This is how any theme would update its structure.
  • The post_class, comment_class, and body_class are functions that output standard classes for the body, post, and comment enclosures. They are not required, but have been around since WordPress 2.8, and are usually present in themes. It is a more dynamic way to add structure.

For most people, this is a simple way to add basic microformats structure that allows your site to be parsed by a microformats 2 parser. The second part will be covering some more complicated issues.

Why Microformats

I’ve spent some time on this site commenting on the use of various Indieweb concepts, but I haven’t really touched on Microformats. Microformats just turned 11 years old.

Microformats are human-readable markup that are easily human readable as well as machine readable. They appear as classes attached to HTML elements in webpages. The most popular alternatives to Microformat markup are things like schema.org, RDFa, etc.

The mistake people make is that it is overly technical. The vocabulary of the current iteration of the standard is simple. The below is a simple example. For example, h-card is the vocabulary for marking up people, organizations, and places. The below is a minimal h-card identifying name and associated URL.

<div class="h-card">
<h3 class="p-name">David Shanske</h3>
<a class="u-url" href="https://david.shanske.com">Website></a>
</div>

Then there is h-entry, which is used for individual posts on this site, or any episodic content. It is a equally easy, though like h-card, you can add more elements.

<div class="h-entry">
<time class="dt-published" datetime="2016-06-22T02:34:16-0400">June 22, 2016</time> <p class="e-content">This is my content</p> </div>

And so on. Not only does it identify…what is the content, what is the publish date, etc. in a way a human could realistically read enough to mark it up, it can be parsed and read by a computer. It is easy, if you understand HTML enough to read it, how to mark up the elements.

And then come the advantages. If parsers can read the elements of your site, they can interpret your intent. The community has developed vocabulary to indicate many relevant things, and put out programs, sites, and in my case, WordPress plugins that take this data and turns it into things like: ‘likes’, meaningful comments, event RSVPs, etc.

I’ve been posting articles on adding Microformats to a WordPress site. Once added, the site can be properly parsed, and can be used to do these things. How do I know? My site already does them.

 

 

Timezone Offsets in WordPress Themes

There is an odd implementation detail of many themes that has created a parsing problem with timestamps. It is actually a WordPress/PHP issue. The below is an excerpt from _s(Underscores) that appears in a large amount of themes.

$time_string = sprintf( $time_string,
   esc_attr( get_the_date( 'c' ) ),
   get_the_date(),
   esc_attr( get_the_modified_date( 'c' ) ),
   get_the_modified_date()
);

The string in question is used in a generated line of HTML, which usually looks like something below.

<time datetime="2016-06-21T22:48:40+00:00">June 21, 2016</time>

A parser reading the above will read it as 10:48PM UTC/GMT. Assuming it converted that into local time, it would actually be 6:48PM EDT. However, in reality, I posted at 10:48PM Eastern Time. It just omitted the timezone offset, putting in +00:00.

The timezone offset is properly shown if you replace ‘c’ with DATE_W3C or DATE_ATOM. The alternative is to add the date in as GMT.  Without proper timezone offsets, posts will be parsed as being at the wrong time.

Related:

https://core.trac.wordpress.org/ticket/25768

https://core.trac.wordpress.org/ticket/20973

 

 

Liked Day that Ireland really took off – Aer Lingus turns 80 (independent.ie)
On May 22, 1936, Aer Lingus registered as an airline. On May 27, 1936, five days after that, the first flight took off from Dublin to Bristol. I’ve been employed by Aer Lingus for just under thirteen years. While I rarely post much about my employer…they do make it possible for me to post about other things.
Replied to UNESCO says no Jewish history on Temple Mount; Hebron and Bethlehem 'Integral part of Palestine' ( The Jerusalem Post | JPost.com )

Unclear who will benefit from polemical decision.

You’ve got to be kidding me. You want to say it is contested…fine. But suggesting that there are fake Jewish graves being set up and no evidence of a Jewish presence…

Why Webmentions in WordPress

I had originally wrote this on January 27th, as part aof an email exchange between myself and the WP Tavern. However, after being told by Jeff Chandler, contributing writer for the site, that he was away and would discuss the matter further in March, I received no further word. After the site posted a somewhat inaccurate article on webmentions on March 18th, I commented to them again that I was disappointed that the article was not checked for accuracy. Again, no response. So I am posting my January 27th article and withdrawing from WP Tavern’s request for exclusivity on any such article due lack of response on their part. The dialogue on Webmentions in WordPress continues.

 

Over the last few years, as the smartphone has become more popular, we’ve moved from being excited about notifications to being worried about notification overload. Companies are hoping to get more data on us so they can tailor their interactions with us. We install analytics on our websites to determine how many visitors we get and what they did on our sites. At its simplest level, a linkback is a way of having a site(the sender) notify another site(the receiver) when it links to it. It sounds like something we would want to know and would have many potential uses.

WordPress has two built in linkback protocols: Trackback and Pingback. To many users, they seem like the appendix of WordPress. People don’t care about them until they are exploited by bad actors. There is a newer protocol, the first linkback protocol to be accepted as a draft specification from the W3C, the main standards organization for the Internet, called Webmention.

Webmention improves upon the previous protocols. It uses an HTTP POST request to send two parameters…the source and target URL. By comparison, trackback, which also uses HTTP, only sends the source URL and does nothing in its WordPress form to verify the trackback is legitimate. Pingback, like webmention, sends both source and target, but it uses XML-RPC as opposed to a POST request. XML-RPC has had some controversy around it as well. There are also several practices that are recommended by the Webmention specification that would make an implementation more robust than the implementations of Trackback and Pingback.

WordPress has a longstanding reputation of commitment to backward compatibility and isn’t going to flick the switch and remove pingback and trackback code from WordPress Core so easily, with or without a replacement.  It makes sense to make improvements to the older protocols concurrently with adopting webmentions, although it would also be a good idea to consider gradually deprecate the older protocols in favor of webmentions. Trackbacks have no source validation built into WordPress as it was not part of the original specification. The pingback code could use some love. However, with some refactoring, new webmention code could be used to update the older pingback/trackback code as well. This would create a better linkback system overall.

Even if webmention is a better delivery system for linkbacks than its predecessors, no one but a developer cares about protocols. People care about what it can do for you. All of the protocols converge in one place. Once you know a site has linked to you, what do you do with that information? That is where the exciting parts come in and where WordPress falls flat.

If one person would like to speak up in favor of the presentation of […]Useless Context. […], I’d love to hear it. The burden of presentation and use in a linkback relationship goes to the receiver and can be infinitely extensible. What WordPress lacks is a good base presentation for people to enhance and some innovative examples from the community of usage. If you can parse a page of HTML, you can come up with richer content and relationships by marking up the elements of a post with Microformats. WordPress already has some microformats embedded in most WordPress sites and supporting in many themes, and there are other efforts that can be made to better improve this side of things. But there are limitless possibilities, for example:

  • Want to reply to a post on WP Tavern on your own site? Send a webmention(or more archaic protocol) to WP Tavern with the URL of your reply. WP Tavern could parse your site and generates an actual comment from it.
  • Why only a reply? What about other types of relationships? Liking a post, for example?
  • Even just simple administrator stats can be interesting and useful.

So, why not do all of this with an API? We have a new one coming into WordPress…and that’s a great thing I’m fully in favor of. But reading content from a website using an API creates a burden on both sides of the relationship. I have to write an API and you have to learn how to use it if you want to interface with my site. Why shouldn’t your website be your API?

If you are interested in trying webmention support, there is a basic plugin for WordPress. There is even a second plugin that uses Microformats2 plus linkbacks to generate richer comments. Both of these can be used to develop the more robust implementation that would be required for WordPress Core. For more information on how people have been using webmentions, visit IndieWebCamp.