Category Archives: XML

del.icio.us

Posted on by David

I’ve been using del.icio.us to store my bookmarks lately. If you haven’t seen it yet, del.icio.us is a social bookmark application. You can add your bookmarks to the site and store them under specific keywords. You can then easily browse your stored links by the topics you have added.

Where it gets extra-nifty is that you can also see what other users have been posting under the same keywords. Each keyword provides an RSS feed of new entries, so you end up with nice feed on a particular topic. For example, here is the feed for KM. You can even subscribe to an RSS feed for all the links posted by a particular person. Here is my del.icio.us feed.

Del.icio.us also provides web service access to its data, so you end up with tools like Foxylicious, which is a wonderful extension for the Firefox browser that imports all of your del.icio.us entries into your Firefox bookmarks. Excellent.

Keynote's APXL

Posted on by David

Just came across an Apple developer connection article on how Apple’s Keynote presentation software stores all presentation data in an xml document:

At the heart of the Keynote presentation file is the presentation.apxl file, which specifies every detail of the presentation’s appearance and behavior—from the appearance of the master slide and each individual slide to the transitions used between slides and the state of the presentation when the customer first opens it.

The article goes on to talk about some of the nifty possibilities of integrating your databases and applications with Keynote. My own idea is that with a little (ok, maybe a lot) of hacking, you could provide a Keynote presentation feed for your weblog.

I love XML.

In the careful what you ask for department…

Posted on by David

RSS Traffic Burdens Publisher’s Servers:

InfoWorld, which is hosted by Verio, is committed to RSS. But Dickerson says he’s spoken with other large media sites that have delayed implementing RSS feeds, citing potential overhead on IT infrastructure. Some major publishers of RSS feeds are high-traffic sites that already use content distribution and caching to manage server load, such as Yahoo.

While a relatively small number of sites are currently seeing RSS traffic on the scale of InfoWorld, that’s likely to change as the technology becomes more popular. “If RSS is going to go from fairly big to absolutely huge, we’re all going to need to do a little more work on the plumbing,” Dickerson writes.

I wonder if any of the RSS client authors/producers have thought about randomizing thier collection times a bit to spread out the load?

Update:Bloglines‘ CEO has a few thoughts on how to improve the load issue.

Integrated Taxonomic Information System

Posted on by David

Have you ever wanted an xml document that contained the entire set of species for a paticular kingdom? The Integrated Taxonomic Information System is the site for you.

The goal is to create an easily accessible database with reliable information on species names and their hierarchical classification. The database will be reviewed periodically to ensure high quality with valid classifications, revisions, and additions of newly described species. The ITIS includes documented taxonomic information of flora and fauna from both aquatic and terrestrial habitats.

Excellent use of the web to deliver data to the research community. What they don’t have yet (as far as I could tell) is an RSS feed listing new species as they are discovered. That would be extra nifty.

Google Goes Atom

Posted on by David

Google spurns RSS for rising blog format | CNET News.com. I typically don’t pay much attention to the syndication standards wars but this is kind of interesting. Google has gone with the Atom standard instead of RSS for syndication on its Blogger network. Existing Blogger Pro users with RSS feeds can keep them but all other Blogger customers will only be able to deploy Atom feeds.

As long as all the popular newsfeed readers implement Atom, I don’t think it will make much difference to the end users. Anyone maintaining a list of Atom adoption in reader software?

Update: I should have dug a little deeper on the Atom site. Here is a directory of client software (mostly readers) that supports Atom. Thanks, dw!

XSL Tool

Posted on by David

I have been using a demo of Stylevision 5 at work to create an XSL template that will transform our scholarly journal content from xml to html on our web site.

The tool is pretty easy to use, just drag-and-drop elements from the DTD onto a page for layout. More complex XML documents will require some knowledge of XPath queries and a basic understanding of XSL but even with that it is a huge productivity booster.

Posted in XML