Scripting News

Sun, 17 Nov 2002 13:12:13 GMT

Good afternoon and happy Sunday.

Mon, 18 Nov 2002 03:14:22 GMT

Phillip Pearson is watching the wizzy front ends for aggregators.

Mon, 18 Nov 2002 03:14:49 GMT

Got an interesting email about where RDF might be where hypertext was in the 80s. Lots of people, including myself, wrote it off as impractical. Then HTTP/HTML came out and changed everything. All of a sudden all the former naysayers are doing what they said they'd never do. The RDF proponents think they have something like that. Hey I hope they do. And I hope they lose the attitude. No reason their dreams have to interfere with the work we're doing now, right?

Mon, 18 Nov 2002 03:11:32 GMT

Werblog: "At 9:40AM this morning, my laptop popped up a message that it had detected a WiFi signal. That wouldn't be unusual, except that I was somewhere between Wilmington and Baltimore on the Amtrak Acela train."

What's coming up in XML

RSS caught on because it was good at delivering stories from big news organizations and at the same time delivering weblog content. Interesting aggregation tools were possible because there was a critical mass of content. This was and remains the hard work. No format, no matter how interesting, sophisticated or powerful can gain traction without content.

RSS still has more to do. The next big innovation will be blog-browsers, native apps that browse archives of weblogs outside the limits of Web browsers, and archives of weblogs will be in RSS 2.0 because it's a very simple format, you can understand it without understanding any theory beyond what you've already learned with HTML, and because it's an easy evolution for the most deployed formats, 0.91 and 0.92.

The XML-RPC interface for the aggregator will be important as well, it will allow user interfaces to connect up to powerful engines. More XML-RPC interfaces are coming, particularly awaited is the next level of the Blogger API. We hope it will build on the MetaWeblog API.