"Sometime in late summer I took a break with some of the other engineers and went to a local bar on Castro street in Mountain View. The bar was the St. James Infirmary and it had a 30 foot wonder woman statue inside among other interesting things. At some point in the evening I mentioned that it was sad that Lynx was not going to be able to display many of the HTML extensions that we were proposing, I also pointed out that the only text style that Lynx could exploit given its environment was blinking text. We had a pretty good laugh at the thought of blinking text, and talked about blinking this and that and how absurd the whole thing would be. The evening progressed pretty normally from there, with a fair amount more drinking and me meeting the girl who would later become my first wife." ... I LOVE THE INTERNET

"Inside the TileMill Mac OS X App
The app allows for easy previewing of MBTiles files
11:35am Today by Konstantin Käfer

One of the new features in the latest TileMill release is the new TileMill Mac OS X app, which makes creating maps easier than ever. In this post, I'll discuss quickly what the app does and then talk about the process of creating it.

The TileMill app features a QuickLook plugin that makes it easy to preview MBTiles files. Like any other QuickLook-enabled file type, you can just hit the space bar and immediately see the tiles contained in the file, without having to set up TileStream.

Previewing MBTiles files

The preview isn't just a static image. It's fully interactive, and you can pan and zoom from the preview to explore other parts of the tileset. It's not restricted to just the QuickLook function either. You can see a preview tile whenever the Finder generates a thumbnail for the MBTiles file, and with Justin's Spotlight importer it's easy to find MBTiles files on your computer by indexing the metadata in an MBTiles file.

Use Spotlight to find your file

Apart from previewing and searching MBTiles files, the TileMill application now also contains a Preferences dialog that allows some fine tuning, as well as automatic updates using the excellent Sparkle framework.

Automatic updates with Sparkle
Technical details

QuickLook plugins are implemented as regular HTML pages displayed by WebKit. This allows us to just use ModestMaps and the Wax toolkit to create a tile viewer. The Spotlight importer reads the metadata table of an MBTiles file and provides that information to the search indexer.

However web pages displayed in a QuickLook preview can't access any resources via the http: or file: scheme. This unfortunately rules out starting a node.js server and dynamically querying the MBTiles files for the required tiles. Luckily, the QuickLook framework allows 'attaching' resources to the preview HTML file and makes them accessible using the cid: protocol scheme. Many MBTiles files contain millions of tiles, so loading all of them isn't an option. We decided to load the tiles around the center of the file and two zoom levels above and below. This enables panning and zooming in a restricted range around the center and should give you a good impression of the MBTiles file you're dealing with. We found that performance was still very good, even when loading several hundred tiles. Typically generating a preview takes less than half a second and should appear as almost instant."

inline "chapters" (as in <p id="chapter9">) that cause the sidebar to change as the page scrolls. nicely done.

"The QuoteLink Opera extension creates links for the quotes in html file. Quotes are described by blockquote and q elements. When these elements carry, a cite attribute containing the URI of the source of the quoted text, the QuoteLink extension display it with a ⓘ." –– sudo make me a bookmarklet

"Demo Time, Part 1: A simple camera app"

useful for something, probably

"This notebook was created by Blaine Cook and Maureen Evans for the occasion of South By Southwest, 2011. We've stood tall on the shoulders of giants. The idea is stolen wholesale from the fine James Bridle, who constructed a notebook for the event held in 2010.

The maps were made possible by a group of esteemed friends from San Francisco. ModestMaps.py was used extensively to render the maps from dynamic sources, and is awesome. Thanks, Mike. Thmike. The maps themselves are OpenStreetMaps cum Cloudmade, which are great services if you have maps to design.

Really, though, the shining star, our Space Claw, is Aaron Straup-Cope, whose tireless work on creating little guidebooks of joy was the cornerstone of our mapwork. Straup, we hardly touched your opus; the best is yet to come. Oh, and Prettymaps, used for the cover, are fucking rad and beautiful, don't you agree? Aaron++

One more thing: the whole damn thing is HTML and images over HTTP. We don't need no stinkin' photoshop. Thanks, wkhtmltopdf. Thwkhtmltopdf. One day you'll be all grown up and make us proud. Damn proud."

"html2text is a Python script that converts a page of HTML into clean, easy-to-read plain ASCII text. Better yet, that ASCII also happens to be valid Markdown (a text-to-HTML format)."

"Norman raises the issue of mixed content. This is an important issue, but I think the response of the average Web developer can be summed up in a single word: HTML. The Web already has a perfectly good format for representing mixed content. Why would you want to use JSON for that?  If you want to embed HTML in JSON, you just put it in a string. What could be simpler? If you want to embed JSON in HTML, just use <script> (or use an alternative HTML-friendly data representation such as microformats). I'm sure Norman doesn't find this a satisfying response (nor do I really), but my point is that appealing to mixed content is not going to convince the average Web developer of the value of XML."