[Peerpress-main] Anyone alive out there?

[Joakim Ziegler]

On Tue, Jan 02, 2001 at 08:47:37PM +1030, Nick Lothian wrote:
>> this. Specifically, RSS 1.0 has done a lot of the work for us.
 
> Although the RDF syntax is a dog.

Well, ideally, you won't have to look at it much, given decent code to
generate it. It has a fairly complete featureset, though.


>> 2) Define an XML format for a single item's full data. This might be a little
>> more work, since RSS1.0 doesn't currently do this in a very good way. We
>> might want to use XHTML1.0, or possibly a subset of it. It needs to include
>> roughly the text markup functionality of XHTML, some paragraph-level markup,
>> possibly simple tables, and have functions for linking to related media (with
>> anchor points in the text, much like HTML3.2's <fig> element). It would be
>> fairly easy to draw up our own format here, since we can just borrow bits
>> from other formats (or, alternately, just use the different formats through
>> namespaces, but that would be a little bit too patchwork-like for my tastes).

> How about XHTML-Basic or whatever it is called? I haven't looked at it at
> all, but I suspect it might be an easier starting point that full XHTML

Good idea. I took a look, and it seems that the Text Module, Hypertext
Module, List Module, Basic Tables Module, and Image Module put together are
very close to what we need. Sadly, there are still a couple of shortcomings
(specifically, the <img> element is very feeble compared to a decent <figure>
type element). But we can work around that.


>> Please give me your comments. I'm especially interested in what features
>> should go into the XML DTDs for 1.0. I can crank out the XML DTDs myself,
>> probably, and if needed, I can also code up a small PHP implementation of
>> the HTTP transfer system, backed by mySQL or Postgres. Feedback is welcome,
>> help even more so. When the proof of concept is working, I'd love to see Perl
>> and Python modules, Apache modules in C, etc. all implementing the same
>> scheme, as well as support patches for Slash, Squishdot, Scoop, and
>> mod_virgule, so it'll be easy to deploy this.

> I'm doing Java stuff now, so I might be able to come up with a Java version
> (time permitting).

That would be interesting. I'm not aware of any Java systems that this would
be immediately useful for, but then again, Java is used for a lot of stuff in
the strangest places, so it's probably a good language to have support for
(also it has a fair amount of XML parsers and http functionality built in, so
it shouldn't be too hard to do this).

-- 
Joakim Ziegler - Helix Code web monkey - joakim at helixcode.com - Radagast at IRC
      FIX sysop - free software coder - FIDEL & Conglomerate developer
            http://www.avmaria.com/ - http://www.helixcode.com/