New validator released!

asheesh, January 6th, 2009

This past summer, Hugo Dworak worked with us (thanks to Google Summer of Code) on a new validator. This work was greatly overdue, and we are very pleased that Google could fund Hugo to work on it. Our previous validator had not been updated to reflect our new metadata standards, so we disabled it some time ago to avoid creating further confusion. The textbook on CC metadata is the “Creative Commons Rights Expression Language”, or ccREL, which specifies the use of RDFa on the web. (If this sounds like keyword soup, rest assured that the License Engine generates HTML that you can copy and paste; that HTML is fully compliant with ccREL.) We hoped Hugo’s work on a new validator would let us offer a validator to the Creative Commons community so that publishers can test their web pages to make sure they encode the information they intended.

Hugo’s work was a success; he announced in August 2008 a test version of the validator. He built on top of the work of others: the new validator uses the Pylons web framework, html5lib for HTML parsing and tokenizing, and RDFlib for working with RDF. He shared his source code under the recent free software license built for network services, AGPLv3.

So I am happy to announce that the test period is complete, and we are now running the new code at http://validator.creativecommons.org/. Our thanks go out to Hugo, and we look forward to the new validator gaining some use as well as hearing your feedback. If you want to contribute to the validator’s development or check it out for any reason, take a look at the documentation on the CC wiki.

Internet Explorer and Internationalized JsWidget (0.3)

asheesh, August 1st, 2007

The scrubbing bubbles have been at work again on JsWidget. JsWidget is an attempt to let web application developers insert the Creative Commons “Choose a license” questions into their application by just including one file from creativecommons.org.

I just released a new pre-release version of JsWidget, version 0.3. You can read about the project on its wiki page, including learning how to use it. There are some interesting new features:

First of all, it’s compatible with Internet Explorer. My generated JavaScript code was suffering from a correctness issue that using XHTML in Firefox showed me, and fixing that made it render in Internet Explorer. (Then I had to switch from using onChange to onClick, again a subtle correctness issue.)

Secondly, it supports a cool form of internationalization called HTTP Content Negotiation. Web browsers optionally (but usually) send a header to the web server indicating the sort of content they can accept, including what languages the user wants to read. In addition to the old ?locale= form of specifying a language, the text should be translated to the user’s native language. (Unfortunately not all of the strings are translated yet, but try hovering over an info box or looking through the list of jurisdictions. In all cases where we don’t have a translation, we fall back to US English.)

Finally, it supports a feature called “license seeding.” By default, the UI offers the user the Attribution license in the generic jurisdiction. By passing in a URL, you can change that starting point. This is especially useful for letting a user revisit a license choice he made in the past and consider changing it.

You can read more about these features on the wiki page for this project, and if you’re sly you could even look at your plan for the future. But the most fun thing to do always is to play with our demos! Now there are three:

• Standard use
• With “seeding” a license
• With “seeding” a license whose version is upgraded

The easiest way yet to integrate CC licensing into a web app (preview)

asheesh, July 19th, 2007

I’ve been working for the past week or so on a JavaScript licensing widget that has been suggested on our wiki. It’s a new way to integrate CC licensing into your web application. It’s really as easy as pie: Just add the following tag somewhere in the body:

<script src=”http://api.creativecommons.org/jswidget/tags/0.1/complete.js” />

and a CC licensing widget will appear. Your web application can then use
regular DOM queries to determine the user’s choice.

NOTE that this is not ready for prime-time use! I want feedback on what people would like us to add or change. Right now it serves only English-language text; in the future you will be able to add ?locale=, stick your language code at the end, and get text back in your language. Beyond translation, tell me how else I can be of service!

You can download a trivial sample application and a long-ish README at our SourceForge project. For y’all’s convenience here’s a link to the README.

It’ll take you all of five minutes to deeply understand what’s going on, so I suggest you do if you’re thinking about (or if you already are) offering CC licensing to users of web applications you work on.

(P.S. This is cross-posted to the cc-devel list.)

Liblicense has licenses! 376 of them…

Jason Kivlighn, July 6th, 2007

Prepping for the 0.1 release, I’ve generated RDF descriptions of all CC licenses in all available jurisdictions, as well as the GPL, LGPL, and Public Domain.

Available here:
https://cctools.svn.sourceforge.net/svnroot/cctools/liblicense/trunk/licenses/

Each license, if applicable, has all the attributes laid out on the wiki, including localization. One problem, however, is getting localized descriptions of the licenses. That isn’t available at https://cctools.svn.sourceforge.net/svnroot/cctools/i18n/trunk/i18n/

Licenses were generated with this python script, which reads the relevant information from creativecommons.org and cctools svn.

More Summer of Code — Liblicense, Tracker, Beagle,…

Jason Kivlighn, June 30th, 2007

Let’s see, where am I at.

Code in GStreamer to read the license URI is getting pushed through. Now there’s Bug #451939 that updates the GStreamer API with a license and copyright uri tag. When this all gets pushed through, access to the license URI will be available through GST_TAG_LICENSE_URI and/or GST_TAG_COPYRIGHT_URI.

In Tracker, I’ve written code to handle generic indexing of embedded/sidecar XMP. Previously it just extracted the license, and now any elements can be pulled out and indexed. Currently, Dublin Core and CC elements are indexed. The code is still local, and yet to be committed.

In another direction, I’ve been lending a hand to liblicense. As mentioned in Scott’s previous post, I’ve got two i/o modules ready. Both are based on Exempi. One reads/writes license metadata directly into Quicktime, AVI, PDF, PNG, TIFF, and JPEG formats. The other read/writes sidecar XMP for any format. There’s more to come.

I also want to look into a liblicense config module and frontend for KDE4. I figure I can put my KDE programming experience to good use.

And in yet another direction, I’m looking into indexing licenses in Beagle. After browsing the code, I can adapt most of what I learned about license metadata while working with Tracker to extending Beagle. I even notice that their image formats filters already support extracting XMP, so adding the extra license checks is straightforward. A preliminary patch and request for feedback has been posted on their mailing list.

All in all, I’ve done some work here and there, for this project and that…

Enhanced Metadata Graduates from Labs

Nathan Yergler, June 21st, 2007

Early this morning we launched some functionality on the main “license chooser”:http://creativecommons.org/license previously available only on “Labs”:http://labs.creativecommons.org. As many (ok, at least a few) people have noted, we previously stopped embedding RDF in the HTML generated by the chooser. As we’ve “noted”:http://wiki.creativecommons.org/Extend_Metadata#Embedding_RDF_in_HTML in the past, RDF in a comment has several draw backs, not the least of which is that it’s opaque to parsers. The new update to the license chooser restores the embedded metadata using “RDFa”:http://rdfa.info.

As the name implies, RDFa is a way of expressing RDF using _attributes_ in the HTML. This is similar to microformats, but different in that any RDFa parser can read any RDFa information — no special knowledge required. So the new metadata once again allows you to encode the name of your work, your name, and the type of work, all in the HTML. A full example (with all fields filled in) is shown here:

CC TechBlog by
Creative Commons is licensed under a
Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License.

Based on a work at
creativecommons.org.

Permissions beyond the scope of this license may be available at
http://creativecommons.org/policies.

So how do you know the metadata is there? Check out the “RDFa Bookmarklets”:http://www.w3.org/2006/07/SWD/RDFa/impl/js/ which demonstrate how you can expose the information using some simple Javascript.

*UPDATE* Unfortunately WordPress MU strips out attributes it doesn’t recognize, so the example above isn’t as complete as it could be.