Year: 2002

Categories
RDF

Why RSS?

Recovered from the Wayback Machine.

Dave asked the question: Why is RSS 1.0 called RSS? Since I’m writing a book on RDF and just finished my chapter on RSS (no, that wasn’t the one I lost), I feel qualified to answer this.

Dave, the RSS in RSS 1.0 stands for “RDF Site Summary”. The RSS in previous versions of RSS stood for “Rich Site Summary”.

Though Dave didn’t specifically ask this, I will: why involve RDF? And my answer is: for the exact same reason we build databases based on the relational data model rather than create our own storage scheme for each business data need – expediency.

By using an accepted and agreed on data model to define and store the data, a wide variety of tools and APIs can process the data without having to be rewritten for each specific application. The relational data model provides this for traditional databases; RDF provides this for XML.

By bringing RSS into compliance with the RDF specifications, you can (as I did yesterday) process an RSS document using the same pre-built APIs, services, and applications used to process RDF/XML defining other business processes. This processing reuse allows folks to focus on the unique needs of the business and the business data, rather than on the mechanics of how to process, store, or generate the XML.

This is no different than being able to store many different types of business data in an Oracle database and then access it using SQL.

Categories
Just Shelley

Today is for working

The best part of getting up early is watching the sun rise.

Today is for working, it is. Today is for nose down and finishing tasks and making milestones. I’ve marked out in my mind tasks to accomplish with each new position of the sun. The sun’s “here”, this is done. The sun’s “there”, that is done. The sun sets, and finished tasks will lay all about me, littering my desk but not my mind.

No time for play or foolishness today. Politics must wait, and beauty must sit on hold. Because today is for working, it is.

Sunrise

Categories
Just Shelley

If you can read this, you’re lucky

I am playing on the server today, which means if you can read this now, you’re lucky. Expect slow access times and strange pages. Broken Things.

In the meantime, Jonathon finally introduces us to his new friend, Reimi, a beautiful gray haired, green eyed lady. In fact, she looks a bit like my own lovely lady, Zoe.

Zoe

Dorothea is burning … bread. I hear you Dorothea: my alarm goes off every time I make toast. I personally like burnt toast, almost black in color. I think there’s nothing like a little carbon to get you going in the morning.

BTW, Dorothea and I have the same taglines on a dare, but I kind of like “An unnatural manifestation of androgynous weblogging” for my weblog. I’m thinking of keeping it. A poll to my weblog readers, which do you prefer:

An unnatural manifestation of androgynous weblogging

-or-

A node at the edge

Today is an extremely good RDF day, and I am zooming along at the speed of light. Productivity, thou art my middle name. (Well, actually, it’s Rae, but who’s picking nits?) When I get to a good breaking point in the writing, I have two book reviews to post (on “The Sportswriter” and “The Rings of Saturn”), and the weblog to create for my book-on-the-hoof Coming of Age in John Birch Country.

(Hint. And you all should have have an application or two to play with this coming week. Hint.)

That’s all. Go about your lives.

Categories
Weblogging

World Summit weblog

Many thanks go out to Farrago for pointing out that there’s an extremely well organized weblog covering the World Summit.

Now, this is what a political weblog is all about. Take a look and tell me you’re not impressed with the organization of this weblog. It’s incredible.

Not only can you keep up daily what’s happening at the Summit, but you can post comments and the people maintaining the weblog will try and get questions answered, follow through on tips, and so on.

It’s a late start, the summit is already under way, but here’s the link.

Update: Rebecca Blood provided coverage of this weblog. And Dave just came through with a link. Thanks Dave!!!

 

 

Categories
Technology Weblogging

Threadneedle just got competition

Ben and Mena at Movable Type just released a Trackback threading tool that will build an entire tree out of MT trackbacks. Here’s a page showing the Trackbacks from one of my earlier postings

Yes, this is what ThreadNeedle is supposed to do. Yes, ThreadNeedle is not finished.

When you enable TrackBack for a posting, Movable Type embeds a small piece of RDF in the page, such as the following:

 

<rdf:RDF xmlns:rdf=”http://www.w3.org/1999/02/22-rdf-syntax-ns#”
xmlns:dc=”http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/”>
<rdf:Description
about=”http://burningbird.net/cgi-bin/mt-tb.cgi?tb_id=17″
dc:title=”World Summit Weblog”
dc:identifier=”http://weblog.burningbird.net/archives/000476.php”
dc:subject=”Politics”
dc:description=”Many thanks go out to Farrago for pointing out that there’s an extremely well organized weblog covering the World Summit. Now, this is what a political weblog is all about. Take a look and tell me you’re not impressed with…”
dc:creator=”shelley”
dc:date=”2002-08-2514:00:27-06:00″ />
</rdf:RDF>

 

This simplified RDF can be embedded because all of the RDF data is treated as attributes — notice that there’s nothing outside of the Description element? Attributes don’t get printed out via the parsers in the browsers.

So, why can’t I do this with ThreadNeedle? Two reasons.

First, I can’t control the output of the weblogging tools, so if I give you a piece of RDF to embed in your posting, the weblogging tool will try to add break tags (< br/>) to the code to handle line breaks in the RDF. This screws up all RDF processors.

Secondly, anything more sophisticated then the example I showed you requires special handling to embed the RDF in HTML/XHTML. Surrounding the data with the Script tags will work — the parsers ignore anything contained in script tags. However, this still doesn’t solve the problem of weblogging tool munging.

I can generate RDF, and it’s very doable to create an application that finds the RDF, and follows the threaded entries to the new page and looks for embedded RDF and so on (as the Movable Type Trackback threading application does, except that it uses the Trackback data stored in our local data stores) but I can’t control the munging of the RDF by the weblogging tool.

Ben, Mena, this was cool. Really. And thanks! I hate to be greedy, but can you and Ev and Dave and the other weblogging tool builders give us a window in the weblog posting page to include content that is embedded directly in the posting, without manipulation by the weblogging tool? Then others, such as myself, can provide functionality — such as ThreadNeedle — that isn’t dependent on the weblogging tool and without having to go through extraordinary means of handling this markup munging problem.

I realize that webloggers can turn off line breaks (either for a weblog or a posting), but many webloggers don’t know how to include their own HTML line breaking tags. What I’m looking for is the best of all possible worlds — a separate window that takes text which is added to the bottom of a weblog posting without any processing by the weblogging tool, while still allowing tool processing of the weblog entry itself.

Pretty please?

In the meantime, I have the Movable Type Threading CGI application running (Access here, pass in the URL of the page with Trackbacks). Feel free to try this with pages that have TrackBack enabled. If it slows my server too much, I’ll have to pull it, but we can give it a try for now.