Tuesday, 12 February 2002

Oh, and while I'm on the subject, here's a quick rant about XSLT that I wrote last December. 12:46:04 PM

What's Wrong with OPML The most recent expansion state of an outline node is not an attribute of the node itself. For editing, this means that when you insert or delete an outline node, you have to recalculate all the line-numbering and regenerate the "expansionState" up the top of the document. For displaying, this means that the user-agent needs to keep track of line numbering of outlines to determine which should be displayed. If expansion state were an attribute of the nodes themselves, you could choose to display (or not display) children of an un-expanded node using simple CSS selectors. Outline node content is an attribute of the outline node. For editing, this means that a lot of characters that would normally be fine have to be escaped as entities, making the document less humanly-readable. For displaying, this means that to display the OPML file in an XML/CSS aware agent, you first have to perform a transformation on the OPML file in order to turn the attributes into text nodes. This adds a completely unnecessary step - usually involving XSLT, one of the world's most sucky languages. If outline content was just a text node, you could display OPML purely using CSS, with no transformation step at all. 12:34:18 PM

It seems that the Radio 8.0 directory has been reorganised to make it easier to find information. This is cool. I think it's easier to find stuff there now, although I may just be getting used to it. I still think that Manila's directory theme gets in the way of good information architecture more than it helps. Think of how the Yahoo! look might help in finding things below the top level faster, for example. There's another Directory of Radio Resources maintained by Andy Sylvester, much in need of a reorganization. Or possibly organization in the first place. I'll have a go at a better structure myself, I think, and see if it catches on. It was pointed out to me last week that the XML button on the directory delivers an OPML file containing the entire directory as one outline, that you can then look at in Radio. This makes things a lot easier to navigate. For Manila directory sites that don't have the XML buttons, the way to get at the OPML file seems predictable - for a directory at http://ruminations.weblogger.com/directory/143, the outline is at http://ruminations.weblogger.com/discuss/reader$143.opml. 12:16:04 PM

© Copyright 2002 Charles Miller. Last update: 12/2/02; 12:16:05 PM.