What are you doing with your blog? January 31, 2002 6:21 AM Subscribe
A question on new web technologies: What new stuff are you guys implementing in your blogs. On my end, I've been dealing with moving my site to an XHTML code-base and looking at stuff like RDF, but I'm wondering what the rest of the community out there is doing. Web Services? SOAP? Any other stuff? I'm trying to figure out new stuff to add to my site and was wondering what the rest of you were looking into.
Lots of weblog developers now add RSS/RDF syndication and an XMLRPC interface to the tool (mainly using the Blogger API).
Since XHTML compliancy is a big matter to me, I'm introducing fixes to character display; which doesn't seem like it is a common feature.
For example it converts HTML entities like & eacute; to their unicode character reference & #233; so that they do not cause problems in XML.
It also fixes bad Microsoft ASCII by changing the range €-Ÿ to their standard unicode counterparts, e.g. & #151; (the em dash) becomes & #8212;
If you've ever pasted MS Word text into a form, you'll understand the need for that fix.
posted by michel v at 7:25 AM on January 31, 2002
Since XHTML compliancy is a big matter to me, I'm introducing fixes to character display; which doesn't seem like it is a common feature.
For example it converts HTML entities like & eacute; to their unicode character reference & #233; so that they do not cause problems in XML.
It also fixes bad Microsoft ASCII by changing the range €-Ÿ to their standard unicode counterparts, e.g. & #151; (the em dash) becomes & #8212;
If you've ever pasted MS Word text into a form, you'll understand the need for that fix.
posted by michel v at 7:25 AM on January 31, 2002
You might try peeking in on this mailing list, where we're discussing similar topics to what to add/change to our own weblog software.
posted by misterioso at 7:56 AM on January 31, 2002
posted by misterioso at 7:56 AM on January 31, 2002
if you're interested in web services and such you might be interested in wasabii. it's a generic extended API along the same vein as the bloggerAPI.
posted by ikarus at 8:48 AM on January 31, 2002
posted by ikarus at 8:48 AM on January 31, 2002
This saves me posting that thread I had been agonising over, since I don't have a link. Does anyone know of an XML DTD which could handle weblog content? I don't mean RSS. Threaded comments would be a help. This would solve import/export problems between tools, and allow custom stylesheets which would function for any weblog's XML stream.
posted by walrus at 11:09 AM on January 31, 2002
posted by walrus at 11:09 AM on January 31, 2002
What new stuff are you guys implementing in your blogs.Well, I've been writing my own, and I think that the idea of an engine imposing XHTML is kinda silly. Ensuring that my engine doesn't produce any HTML allowed me to make an XML feed from a theme. I did an RSS theme in five minutes. Fun fun.
IE5+ (and others?) come with XSL, so XML+XSL would allow their theming client-side and take some of the processing off me. I'd like an XML DTD/Schema for this too.
I haven't found a way of dealing with inline CSS that I'm happy with. Now that <b> and style="font-weight:bold" are the same it seems silly to only to allow one or the other. My inline CSS filter is ineffective and crappy. I'm not happy with it.
Oh, and MS Passport integration.
posted by holloway at 12:34 PM on January 31, 2002
Well, I've been writing my own, and I think that the idea of an engine imposing XHTML is kinda silly. Ensuring that my engine doesn't produce any HTML allowed me to make an XML feed from a theme. I did an RSS theme in five minutes. Fun fun.
Producing (X)HTML by itself is silly. But correcting the author's HTML entities so that they conform to XML standards as much as they can, is not. It helps with RSS and any other XML format.
(By the way, you have <strong> too, which is prefered over <b> nowadays - but <b> validates as XHTML transitional - while using inline style="" declarations for text is a bit like using <font>...)
posted by michel v at 4:11 PM on January 31, 2002
Producing (X)HTML by itself is silly. But correcting the author's HTML entities so that they conform to XML standards as much as they can, is not. It helps with RSS and any other XML format.
(By the way, you have <strong> too, which is prefered over <b> nowadays - but <b> validates as XHTML transitional - while using inline style="" declarations for text is a bit like using <font>...)
posted by michel v at 4:11 PM on January 31, 2002
I thought bold and strong had different purposes. Bold is for visual effect. Strong for emphasis. An entire page in strong was different to an entire page in bold to a blind person, right?
(Or was HTMLTidy not insane by offering to change all occurences of <b> to <strong>?)
But yeah - HTML fragments (the entries) should be corrected to valid XML. This harms no one. My beef is with engines whose HTML preference - however new and shiny - is part of the engine itself.
posted by holloway at 5:25 PM on January 31, 2002
(Or was HTMLTidy not insane by offering to change all occurences of <b> to <strong>?)
But yeah - HTML fragments (the entries) should be corrected to valid XML. This harms no one. My beef is with engines whose HTML preference - however new and shiny - is part of the engine itself.
posted by holloway at 5:25 PM on January 31, 2002
If you use <meta http-equiv="Content-type" content="text/html; charset=iso-8859-1" /> instead of utf-8 you'd still have valid XHTML, and then you can even use HTML entities.
posted by riffola at 6:04 PM on January 31, 2002
posted by riffola at 6:04 PM on January 31, 2002
(By the way, you have <strong> too, which is prefered over <b> nowadays - but <b> validates as XHTML transitional
<strong> and <b> are both perfectly valid Strict (X)HTML, not deprecated at all. I don't know where you get "preferred over <b> nowadays" from. As holloway says, they do different jobs.
posted by rodii at 8:00 PM on January 31, 2002
<strong> and <b> are both perfectly valid Strict (X)HTML, not deprecated at all. I don't know where you get "preferred over <b> nowadays" from. As holloway says, they do different jobs.
posted by rodii at 8:00 PM on January 31, 2002
Dammit, now what? Please read the entities as the appropriate brackets.
posted by rodii at 8:01 PM on January 31, 2002
posted by rodii at 8:01 PM on January 31, 2002
Yeah rodii is correct, both <b> & <i> are in XHTML 1.1.
posted by riffola at 8:33 PM on January 31, 2002
posted by riffola at 8:33 PM on January 31, 2002
riffola -
You can actually use UTF-8 and XHTML and continue using regular HTML expressions. My site is using both and parses correctly on the W3 validator.
posted by TNLNYC at 6:05 AM on February 1, 2002
You can actually use UTF-8 and XHTML and continue using regular HTML expressions. My site is using both and parses correctly on the W3 validator.
posted by TNLNYC at 6:05 AM on February 1, 2002
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posted by jcterminal at 6:36 AM on January 31, 2002