RE: RDF

Just to add some bits to David's response:

>On Sat, Jan 18, 2003 at 02:52:50PM +0000, Jonathan Chetwynd wrote:
>> http://cyberlaw.stanford.edu/lessig/blog/index.rdf
>>
>> does anyone know, or have a decent guess, what tool was used to author
>> this page?
>
>Looks like it could be Moveable Type. http://www.moveabletype.org/

Movable Type is one of the most used blogging tools, which isn't surprising
considering that it's free (for non-profit use), powerful in comparison to
other tools and straightforward to install. The prerequisites are a bit of
web space with commonly-available facilities (ftp, Perl and MySQL or
Berkeley DB), together with a couple of hours time (I can say this with
authority, last week I did my first MT install on a server that was
completely unfamiliar to me, and it took about 2 hours, no particularly
specialised knowledge required). The RDF (RSS 1.0) feed is a very nice
feature!

It is possible to get RSS feeds using most other blogging tools, though note
there in addition to the RSS 1.0 standard there is also an effectively
proprietary thread of specs (RSS 0.93, 2.0) that lacks the RDF
grounding/extensibility.

Scrapers have been developed in various languages to produce RSS feeds from
existing web pages. A quick google should be productive ;-)

The RSS 1.0 spec can be found at :
http://www.purl.org/rss/1.0/
There is also a reasonably active (very helpful) mailing list rss-dev linked
from this address.

>And you might want to look at http://www.fettig.net/projects/hep/
>for a nice tool to view RDF feeds in.

I'm personally a fan of the Amphetadesk newsreader
http://www.disobey.com/amphetadesk/
which apart from being nice & easy to use is emminently hackable, being
written in Python.
Note also that it is possible to view RSS in a regular browser given a
suitable CSS stylesheet, e.g.
http://www.w3.org/2000/08/w3c-synd/style.css

From a WAI viewpoint, though a lot of the development work being done with
RSS 1.0 is inherently accessibility-friendly because of the standards on
which it is based, most of the current emphasis is just on getting
interesting things built - this is very much a young technology. I'm certain
that most developers of RSS tools such as Movable Type would be very
receptive to suggestions and advice from the WAI community.

Cheers,
Danny.

-----------

http://dannyayers.com

"The lyf so short, the craft so long to lerne." - Chaucer

Received on Saturday, 18 January 2003 13:14:08 UTC