Bill Kearney

Exposing your XML

I'm doing a little
experimenting. This is a link to an XML representation of an article here. I've used a pretty wide range of namespaces. The result is you can directly access the raw XML data behind each post.

I'm still refining it a bit. But what this sort of thing /might/ provide is the ability for trackback and similar tools a more robust way to 'get at' the sort of real data those systems might want to use.

Right now I'm building them, individually, via a template. I could just as easily build these on the fly via a CGI. I'm not entirely sure which I prefer. Static files are a predictable load on the CPU and, when possible, I prefer using them.

It starts to get more interesting when items have trackbacks and comments on them. Like this one.

There are some other things that dovetail nicely into this sort of thing. More to come...

Anyway, just thought I'd share some of the work in progress.