Butler Hud

Today I wrote about the Elephant on the Moon, which in turn was written by Samuel Butler, alias Butler Hud. My piece was actually a kind of public diary entry disguised as a What Planet entry sent to my anomalous lights mailing list. It's almost superfluous writing here and there since much of what I've been doing has centered around anomalous lights, and especially the Will-o'-the-wisp.

Speaking of Butler, I rather like the idea of his Cynarctomachy. I wonder if any other machies have been written along the same lines? Frogs and mice, bears and dogs... what next? Penguins and badgers if you're a certain Mr. Geldart, I suppose.

One of the things that I'm hoping to do as part of the Will-o'-the-wisp endeavours is write a large XML database of all of the synonyms involved, e.g. ignis fatuus, hobby lanthorne, Kitty-candlestick, &c. So in the process of thinking about that, I wondered about a hot-comment embedded RELAX NG Compact schema for validation purposes, à la the makerdf script that I wrote, that updates some XML/RDF based on Notation3 embedded within it. Not the best way of providing a schema hint, certainly, but as a proprietary method I think it'll work rather nicely. Also, RELAX NG Compact is very illustrative, so it sorta works as a comment in its intended function too. It's just turning it into a super-comment.

I also wondered about the structure. I think terms have to be delimited with term elements, but then variant spellings can be form child elements of that, and there'll need to be space in there for googlecounts and other annotations of the forms as distinguished from the terms. For citation information, I was thinking of borrowing the name cite from XHTML, but then I wondered about the attribute name for the URI: should it be @href or @uri? Atom went with the former but I'm more inclined to use the latter since it makes more sense that way. In the Atom Extensibility Framework we used @ref, but @uri seems better even for that purpose.