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When it rains, it pours, implementations, that is.
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.
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RESTLog API Implementation
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]
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A Side-by-side comparison with the CommentAPI
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 <a href="http://www.intertwingly.net/blog/1290.soap">this</a>, please read <a href="
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CommentAPI namespace change
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.
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Example of DOM Drudgery
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.
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First Post!
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
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Slashdot, Traffic and click-throughs
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.
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SourceForge now sporting RSS 2.0 feeds
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.
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CommentAPI Mapping Elements
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.
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Pushing Back
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?
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CommentAPI gaining momentum
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.
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CommentAPI now with experimental SOAP support
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.
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Comments via the CommentAPI
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.
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Tim Bray XML Is Too Hard For Programmers
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 "
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Converting XML Nodes into a Dictionary in Python using SAX
Recently I published a Python script for processing XML that turned a set of XML nodes into a dictionary, where the keys were the element names and all the namespaces were 'fixed'. In this case "fixed" means that 'dc' always maps to the Dublin Core namespace. That code worked but had a drawback that it used the DOM processing facilities on Python, which meant that the whole document had to be parsed and loaded into memory during processing.
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Hire this man.
That sucks. Eric Vitiello has lost his job. Eric is the developer that produced the awesome 'pixel' skin for Aggie. Best of luck on the job search Eric.
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Raging Accessibility
Dare I say that raging platypus is the only parody site I've ever seen with an accessibility statement.
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The littlest web service
Tim Ewald, who works at Microsoft on MSDN, is talking about public web services. How about starting with deploying the tiniest web service for MSDN? Funny you sould mention that. I've talked about this very issue with some MSDN people a few months ago. Apparently, they went nowhere after that. At least we already know how to get what we want without having them lift a finger: http://bitworking.org/RssHarvest.html. BTW, Joe, if you correctly name the edit boxes in your the comments form, IE (and probably other browsers as well) will be able to auto-complete them.
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XForms and Security
Andrew Watt has raised some questions on the security in XForms:
There are two potential sources of security concern:
1. That a malicious XForms-containing document can upload files from a user's computer without their knowledge
2. A malicious XForms-containing document could download a virus or other nasty to the user's computer.
However, the current CR seems to rely largely on implementers' common sense ... a dangerous commodity where security is concerned .
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CommentAPI
This version of RESTLog that I am running also supports the CommentAPI. The easiest way to explain it is that you can post a comment via posting an RSS item fragment. Here is how you would do it with cURL:
curl --header "Content-type: text/xml" --data "<item><title>Joe</title><description>Posted via cURL.</description></item>" http://bitworking.org/news/comments/52 Note that the above is typed in as a single command line, just broken up here to fit on the screen better.