I really like Python. The more I work with the language the more I like it. It has a nice clean syntax and a very nice set of standard libraries. In particular it has a wide range of web libraries, from low-level sockets, to cgi processing, to a library for connecting to an IMAP server, it has it all. It even has three libraries for pulling content off the web, httplib, urllib and urllib2.

Spring has finally arrived, with thundershowers today. The rain was nice because it washed away a lot of the pollen. Unless you live in the area you just can't imaging how much pollen is in the air and on the ground. Today before the storm the wind picked up and the pollen was being blown into drifts on the front porch. After the rain, it collected in the street. Puddles of yellow goo a 1/4 inch thick.

The giant sucking sound you hear is another person being sucked up by Microsoft. The furrygoat is the latest victim. Congrats Steve!

ECMA is updating ECMAScript (JavaScript to you and me), with enhancements for XML [via Sam Ruby]. E4X is based on BEAs extensions to ECMAScript in BEA WebLogic Workshop. The BEA article points out the akwardness and verbosity of DOM for manipulating XML, which is something I am fond of harping on. Then it goes on to explain the extensions to ECMAScript for manipulating XML, the here I would like to emphasize the word extensions, as they are not just adding in a new API, but instead are adding in new syntax to the core language for XML.

Ken MacLeod has an updated version of XmlToDictBySAX.py that includes a neat technique for working with namespaces. His code uses James Clark's namespace notation for referring to element names, which is a lot more elegant and robust than my original implementation. In Clark's notation the indirect reference to the namespace URI are mapped to a direct reference. For example: <cars:part xmlns:cars="http://www.cars.com/xml"/> maps to an element name of: {http://www.cars.com/xml}part The idea is to referer to the element by the name {uri}name which avoids the problem of picking different prefixes for the same namespace.

MSDN finally has RSS Feeds! [via Tim Ewald] Posted by odc.co.in on 2005-06-27

First, I haven't been posting much because my day job has been keeping me busy. How busy? Well a normal week might include one special project/product. This week saw 5. Enough said. But, I come out of this crunch to two nice discoveries. First, as promised, Sam Ruby has implemented the Comment API. Secondly, but no less important, Simon Fell has implemented both the client and server-side of the RESTLog interface for his weblog.

The value of uniform and simple interfaces: I've switched the blog over to a RESTLog API style implementation I whipped up in. NET, I could battle the metaWeblogApi no longer. Pingback's and tracksbacks should still be working. Let me know if you spot any problems. I say RESTLog API style because at this point its very similarto the RESTLog API, but doesn't yet implement the spec fully. [Simon Fell]

Sam Ruby has a proposal for a SOAP-based alternative to the CommentAPI. To try to clarify things here is an example interaction for each proposal, starting with Sam's. First, here is the message sent to the end-point: POST /news/comments/5 HTTP/1.1 Content-Type: text/xml <?xml version="1.0"?> <soap:Envelope xmlns:dc="http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/" xmlns:content="http://purl.org/rss/1.0/modules/content/" xmlns:rdf="http://www.w3.org/1999/02/22-rdf-syntax-ns#" xmlns:soap="http://schemas.xmlsoap.org/soap/envelope/" xmlns="http://purl.org/rss/1.0/"> <soap:Header/> <soap:Body> <item rdf:about="http://www.intertwingly.net/blog/1290.html"> <title>Would you? Could you?</title> <link>http://www.intertwingly.net/blog/1290.html</link> <description>Before reading this, please read this.</description> <content:encoded>Before reading &lt;a href="http://www.intertwingly.net/blog/1290.soap"&gt;this&lt;/a&gt;, please read &lt;a href="

Just a heads-up that there has been a slight change to the CommentAPI. This change is in the RSS auto-discovery, the namespace for the wfw:comment element has changed from http://wellformedweb.org to http://wellformedweb.org/CommentAPI.

Mark Pilgrims latest article in XML.com, is not only a really good read on XHTML, XML, HTML and mime-type but also has a really good example of what I am complaining about with the verbosity and akwardness of DOM. Take a look at #6 in his list of caveats for transitioning to application/xhtml+xml. What used to take one line of code expands to six. Six lines of code just to do what used to take one line just because when working with XHTML server up with a mime-type of application/xhtml+xml JavaScript is restricted to using just the DOM to manipulate the content.

Seairth gets to claim the coveted "first post", as he left the very first comment/trackback/ping on this site via the CommentAPI. <h1>In your free time, check the sites about- Tons of interesdting stuff!!! </h1> Posted by anonymous on 2004-12-01

Tim Bray follows up with some information on his recent slashdotting of his XML Is Too Hard for Programmers. He got about 30,000 hits from that article which prominently linked to my Regex-able Xml item. I picked up about 3,000 hits from click-throughs during his Slashdotting. Interestingly enough we can trace it one level deeper, as it appears that Sam Ruby got 300 hits on an essay of his that I linked to at the end of Regex-able XML.

Morbus has been working with the folks at SourceForge and there are now 5 RSS 2.0 feeds available for every project. In case you missed it, that means that there are 292,310 new RSS 2.0 feeds in the wild.

I have updated the CommentAPI to incorporate feedback and added a table that summarizes the mappings from the other services to the CommentAPI. As always, feedback is encouraged. Phil, I didn't forget your feedback for link, it's just that I don't think it's possible. How could the person submitting the comment know what the perma-link should be? Posted by Joe on 2003-03-19 That's where I was trying to head by asking what you return: I post a linkless fragment with my site URL in some other element, you return essentially the same fragment (possibly with my HTML stripped from the text because your comment rules prohibit it) but with the permalink inserted in link.

Sam's example isn't very persuasive for why a namespace should to be added to the 'item' element in the CommenAPI. Here is my own eerily similar example of why the namespace isn't needed and the SOAP envelope is optional. xsd CommentAPI.xsd /c csc capiClient.cs CommentAPI.cs Corrent me if I am wrong, but is the only thing that is causing problems is WSDL's requirement that the items in the SOAP Body be placed in a non-nil namespace?

Adoption of the CommentAPI is taking off. Sam Ruby is talking about adding it to mombo, while Dare Obasanjo will add it to his RSS Bandit if Sam follows through. Meanwhile Ted Leung has added support in his pyblosxom comments and Adrian Frost is working on support for it in BlogWorks. Drop me a note if you know of other blogging software or aggregators that are supporting the CommentAPI that I haven't mentioned here.

I am experimenting with adding support for an optional SOAP envelope on the CommentAPI. I haven't updated the specification for the CommentAPI, waiting instead for feedback from y'all. Thanks to Sam my script will produce a correctly formatted SOAP fault in an error condition. Here are two examples of posts to the comments of this entry, both using cURL. These are both single line commands, just formatted into multiple lines for make them easier to read.

Phil has pointed out that the CommentAPI details how pingbacks and trackbacks are mapped to the RSS 'item' element but it does not detail how a comment is mapped. I have been using a mapping on my implementation of the CommentAPI but haven't documented it. Here is the current mapping: <item> <title>Joe</title> <link>http://bitworking.org</link> <description>The actual text of the comment goes here.</description> </item> I.e. the 'title' is the comment authors name and the 'description' is the comment content.

Ok, when I ask for Regex-able XML, and complain that the pathologies of XML are the root cause of the problem, I might sound like a simpering newbie who just doesn't know how to use the available tools. So how about listening to a guy who's been doing XML longer than almost anybody: Tim Bray. Update: This ends up being a closed loop. Tim Bray emailed me and it turns out that the "