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Updated: 3/20/04; 5:24:48 PM.

activeRenderer Version 1.4 Released

Now Renders RSS Feeds - Includes New Outline Browser

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Friday, May 31, 2002

RSS Link Episode II: Dave Strikes Back
UserLand has just released linkToRss, a new Radio macro to automatically add the link tag to your weblog's RSS feed.

I'm not exactly sure where this is going, but there's been an interesting idea floating around the tech weblogs in the last 24 hours or so.[Dave Winer]
Well, to me, the first obvious benefit is the bookmarklet one can place in either Mozilla's or IE's link bar to automatically subscribe to a weblog's RSS version using Radio's aggregator.
But this is only an alternate way of achieving the same result as the XML coffee mug icon that often is already part of the weblog's page layout.
Let's see if we can come up with more advanced/useful ideas...

7:13:34 PM      Google It!

RSS Feed Auto Discovery
Following Mark Pilgrim's suggestion, I've added the following tag to s l a m's home template :
<link rel="alternate" type="text/xml" title="XML" href="http://radio.weblogs.com/0104487/rss.xml">
Now, every Radio user who has a Subscribe bookmarklet in his/her link toolbar can subscribe to s l a m's RSS feed in Radio's aggregator automagically.
To instal the Subscribe bookmarklet in your link tool, just drag it there. Nifty uh ?
Mark also has a bookmarklet for AmphetaDesk.

4:18:28 PM      Google It!

Working On Transclusion
The last feature missing from activeRenderer as I need it is transclusion: the ability to expand in place OPML outlines linked from the currently rendered outline.
I recently explored several ways of coding this OPML rendering outside of UserTalk.
My first idea was using the W3C DOM level 1 API from Javascript. Hardly original. I studied opmlLoader from Sjoerd Visscher and Hive Renderer from Andy Edmonds.
Both excellent works rely on the document.load() DOM method to retrieve the original XML file in the browser, then perform transformations in Javascript.
Unfortunately, document.load() doesn't work with non HTML - such as OPML - documents when using non Windows versions of the latest browsers. I tried Mozilla with Redhat Linux 7.2, Chimera 0.28 and Internet Explorer 5.1.4 with MacOS X.
No cross-platform ability: DOM/Javascript is out for now. Time for plan B.
Plan B relies on XSLT stylesheets to transform the OPML file into HTML.
I was reluctant to use XSLT in the first place since the only browser that supports XSLT stylesheets on the client side is Internet Explorer 6 for Windows.
On the other hand, there are a number of reliable server based XSLT engines, such as the Apache group Xalan.
Relying on an external server is less a problem than I would have thought. I will probably code the URL to the server I use in an external global variable, so that it may be changed in a #prefs.txt template file.
My current workstation being a G4 Powerbook, I rely on Marc Liyanage's MacOS X based TestXSLT for experimenting with the Sablotron XSL processor from http://www.gingerall.com/charlie/ga/xml/p_sab.xml.
The pioneer of XSLT based OPML rendering is Joshua Allen, who published an opml.xslt stylesheet quite some time ago.
Joshua's rendered HTML is not compatible with non Windows browsers though. I am currently working on a variation to accomodate for activeRenderer's cross-platform style.

1:16:16 PM      Google It!