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Sometimes you just have to have the ball in order to play. Can I have some ball, please? Or should I go all over the place web for a slam dunk?

Sometimes you just have to have the ball in order to play. Can I have some ball, please? Or should I go all over the place web for a slam dunk?

In today’s world where millions of documents are electronic we need a format that is easy recognizable by most devices and operating systems that we use: Mac OS X, Windows, laptop, desktop, Linux, iPhone, eReaders, etc.

From the start, I want to say that the idea, concept, examples and eventually writing the specification, are all mine. So, go ahead, read the lines below and blame me for things that aren’t the way they should be.

The name, Amatl, comes from a form of paper that was manufactured in pre-Columbian Mesoamerica. There are more details about it on Wikipedia, of course. My Amatl is based on HTML5 and CSS (2.1 now and 3.0 in the future), two standards that raised the bar with what we can do in terms of layout, embedding fonts, typography, grid and images or blocks positioning. Basically, Amatl is actually a file format that wants to display paper documents inside browsers without any additional tools or software. The format isn’t intended at replacing Adobe’s PDF format or Microsoft’s XPS; it should be used as a complementary format, open and supported by the the entire industry. The closest resembles to it can be EPUB format but they are two completely different concepts.

Compatibility

The good part about this format is that it can be recognizable by old browsers too, I name Firefox 2 and IE7 here. It’s just HTML after all, right?

Differences

There will be no differences when it comes to HTML5 syntax, maintaining the current specification is very important. Still, I recommend not using meta attributes because they will be present in a CSS metadata header.

The most important differences to CSS is introduction of a DPI value and a CSS metadata header. It will be used to write documents at a higher DPI than 96, which is the standard to all web pages on Internet today.

Structure

The Amatl document files should be packed in a ZIP container, having .am extension (like Document1.am) for offline usage and not only. Browser support will be needed for reading HTML files packed inside a ZIP. It can also be served directly from a server with the following structure:

index.html
page-2.html
page-3.html
|-- styles
   |-- screen.css
   |-- print.css
|-- fonts         /* embeddable fonts should be placed here */
|-- languages     /* support for multi languages documents */
   |-- index-en-us.html
   |-- index-en-gb.html
   |-- index-ro-ro.html
|-- images
|-- videos
|-- audios

Writing, printing and scaling the documents

It should be very easy to write an Amatl document, like writing a blog post with basic HTML tags: p, a, strong, etc. This is because the HTML5 structure of the format is very easy. You can view the source of this example: Document 1. Printing documents can use a print.css file or the browser should interpret the screen.css (remove styles for body and article tags) and print the pages exactly like they are displayed on the screen.

As I said before, Amatl will supports writing HTML5 with custom DPI through CSS. You can understand how this works by viewing the Warp example from Firefox (or any other browser that supports zooming) at minimum zoom. If browsers will adopt this format, you can view higher quality web documents right in your browser, including higher DPI images and graphics and you can print them right away without needing any other software.

Amatl can also use a single HTML file, that embeds CSS, fonts and images and separates pages accordingly. You can see this in the Document 2 example. This can be dropped from the specifications since I prefer a more standard structure for the format.

License

The format should and will be open since it’s based on open technologies, but it will require a commercial license for software products or web applications for writing, managing or printing the documents. More about this in the future and don’t forget there is amatl.org, a dedicated site for this very project.

Please, don’t. At least not on social networks like Twitter. Some days ago Eric Schmidt had an interview which is published on ReadWriteWeb and it’s about what web will look like in five years. One of his questions was “We can index real-time info now – but how do we rank it?”.

Google approach to the web is to rank everything. But on Twitter we all are equal to each other, we have the same number of characters to write a message (140, remember?), the number of followers doesn’t matter, time when you joined Twitter is not important, lists or favourites won’t help either. So basically we don’t need a rank system on Twitter.

Dave Winer votes for ranking on his blog. But, what we really need is an exclusion system. First, we need to exclude spam. Then exclude retweets and repositon the original tweet instead of last retweet with the number of retweets for a possible importance level. Favourites could also matter in ranking tweets up, but again, keeping them sorted by dated is more important.

After all that being said, he thinks that will be impossible possible to rank real time information, but it won’t be that clever.

Please, don’t. At least not on social networks like Twitter. Some days ago Eric Schmidt had an interview which is published on ReadWriteWeb and it’s about what web will look like in five years. One of his questions was “We can index real-time info now – but how do we rank it?”.

Google approach to the web is to rank everything. But on Twitter we all are equal to each other, we have the same number of characters to write a message (140, remember?), the number of followers doesn’t matter, time when you joined Twitter is not important, lists or favourites won’t help either. So basically we don’t need a rank system on Twitter.

Dave Winer votes for ranking on his blog. But, what we really need is an exclusion system. First, we need to exclude spam. Then exclude retweets and repositon the original tweet instead of last retweet with the number of retweets for a possible importance level. Favourites could also matter in ranking tweets up, but again, keeping them sorted by dated is more important.

After all that being said, he thinks that will be impossible possible to rank real time information, but it won’t be that clever.

Please, don’t. At least not on social networks like Twitter. Some days ago Eric Schmidt had an interview which is published on ReadWriteWeb and it’s about what web will look like in five years. One of his questions was “We can index real-time info now – but how do we rank it?”.

Google approach to the web is to rank everything. But on Twitter we all are equal to each other, we have the same number of characters to write a message (140, remember?), the number of followers doesn’t matter, time when you join Twitter is not important, lists or favourites won’t help either. So, we don’t need a rank system on Twitter.

Dave Winer votes for ranking on his blog. But, what we really need is an exclusion system. First, we need to exclude spam. Then exclude retweets and repositon the original tweet instead of last retweet with the number of retweets for a possible importance level. Favourites could also matter in ranking tweets up, but again, keeping them sorted by dated is more important.

After all that being said, he thinks that will be impossible possible to rank real time information, but it won’t be that clever.

Please, don’t. At least not on social networks like Twitter. Some days ago Eric Schmidt had an interview which is published on ReadWriteWeb and it’s about what web will look like in five years. One of his questions was “We can index real-time info now – but how do we rank it?”.

Google approach to the web is to rank everything. But on Twitter we all are equal to each other, we have the same number of characters to write a message (140, remember?), the number of followers doesn’t matter, time when you join Twitter is not important, lists or favourites won’t help either. So, we don’t need a rank system on Twitter.

Dave Winer votes for ranking on his blog. But, what we really need is an exclusion system. First, we need to exclude spam. Then exclude retweets and repositon the original tweet instead of last retweet with the number of retweets for a possible importance level. Favourites could also matter in ranking tweets up, but again, keeping them sorted by dated is more important.

After all that being said, he thinks that will be impossible possible to rank real time information, but it won’t be that clever.

Please, don’t. At least not on social networks like Twitter. Some days ago Eric Schmidt had an interview which is published on ReadWriteWeb and it’s about how he sees web in five years from now. One of his questions was “We can index real-time info now – but how do we rank it?”.

Google approach to the web is to rank everything. But on Twitter we all are equal to each other, we have the same number of characters to write a message (140, remember?), the number of followers doesn’t matter, time to join Twitter is not important, lists or favourites won’t help either. So, we don’t need a rank system on Twitter.

Dave Winer votes for ranking on his blog. But, what we really need is an exclusion system. First, we need to exclude spam. Then exclude retweets and repositon the original tweet instead of last retweet with the number of retweets for a possible importance level. Favourites could also matter in ranking tweets up, but again, keeping them sorted by dated is more important.

After all that being said, he thinks that will be impossible possible to rank real time info, but won’t be clever.

Over the last year or so, I started collecting album covers and squaring each one for better use in media players like iTunes. The purpose of all this was to build my first web app using Django.

But since always dreams don’t manage to become reality, I decided to make this small collection public. There are over 200 covers right now and sorted by the artist name. I have one small request, if you like Dropbox please use this link to register for an account; it gives both of us 250 MB extra space.

My favourite covers, and albums, are Sneaky Sound System’s—an Australian & electronic band—because of clever use of patterns and typography.

After all that being said, he will keep on listening “Dirge” by life Death in Vegas.

Over the last year or so, I started collecting album covers and squaring each one for better use in media players like iTunes. The purpose of all this was to build my first web app using Django.

But since always dreams don’t manage to become reality, I decided to make this small collection public. There are over 200 covers right now and sorted by the artist name. I have one small request, if you like Dropbox please use this link to register for an account; it gives both of us 250 MB extra space.

My favourite covers, and albums, are Sneaky Sound System’s—an Australian & electronic band—because of clever use of patterns and typography.

After all that being said, he will keep on listening “Dirge” by life Death in Vegas.