licentious radio

Wednesday, April 17, 2002
[12:38:37 PM]

Have you looked at: http://catalogs.google.com/

They scan paper catalogs -- lots of them -- and put them online. You navigate through bitmap scans of catalog pages, and zoom in a couple of time to get to the point where you can read the text.

It seems freaky to me that a web search engine would do this. Maybe I should be pleased, as it brings paper content into the digital world.

Are they going to scan magazines and books next?

[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.)