RadioRadio
Wednesday, April 17, 2002
[10:50:21 AM]
Regarding Google and weblogs....
I'm not the only person with this concern: The Bloggle Problem.
As far as I know, XML namespaces allow you to embed tags from one XML DTD in a document based on a different DTD. So you could have xml tags that indicate weblog structure, embedded in the html of the weblog.
I presume that Radio's xml syndication stuff either would work, or be a good start, but it should be very easy. Unless you define stylesheet attributes for them, the browser would completely ignore the extra xml tags.
The example below probably doesn't have enough hierarchy to suit xml gurus, but even they couldn't make it much more complicated. I've also left out the DTD and namespace declarations, mostly because I don't remember exactly how they work.
<wlml> ... <wlml:item> <wlml:permalink url="http://..." /> <wlml:heading> <h4>Weblog item heading</h4> </wlml:heading> <wlml:body> <p>The text of the item here.</p> <p><a href="http://...">permalink</a></p> </wlml:body> </wlml:item> ... </wlml>
The DTD would look a little like the following, though I'd expect this isn't quite right:
<!ELEMENT wlml (item*)> <!ELEMENT item (permalink, heading?, body)> <!ELEMENT permalink (#PCDATA)> <!ATTLIST permalink url CDATA #REQUIRED> <!ELEMENT heading (#PCDATA)> <!ELEMENT body (#PCDATA)>
If somebody fixed this up and Google decided to use it, it would take less than a week for the blogerati to have most of the blog world hooked in. Blogtech spreads faster than a plague. (Yes, I'm kidding.)
© Copyright 2002 john robert boynton.
Last update: 9/27/02; 6:30:44 PM.