Archive of UserLand's first discussion group, started October 5, 1998.

scriptingNews outline for 9/21/2000

Author:Dave Winer
Posted:9/21/2000; 6:11:53 AM
Topic:scriptingNews outline for 9/21/2000
Msg #:21574
Prev/Next:21573 / 21575

News 

NY Times roundtable on music on the Internet.

Surprise is back, so is Carpe Diem.

Justin Sher: The Big Net Music Thing.

HTML Directories 

I edited the docs for HTML Directories, to bring them current with the new features we released yesterday.

Then I started a discussion of how we can move forward with HTML Directories, as a community thing.

Mike Donnelan posts the first directory for a weblog. Every weblog needs a directory, imho.

I linked to his directory from my directory. I'm willing and ready to trade flow for bootstrapping the directory.

Flame capsules 

Eric Bohlman: "An I-message describes the way *you* feel in response to someone else's statements or actions. A you-message renders your personal evaluation of the other person's motivation, character, parentage, etc"

Mimetypes and OPML 

We did some refinement on OPML yesterday. In the spec we say that the mimetype is text/xml. That was not well-thought--through enough.

Yesterday we changed the way the built-in server in RU serves OPML content. We now look at the Accept header. If text/x-opml is in the Accept list, we return it as XML, otherwise we return the content of the OPML document as text/html.

This means you can hit a RU server with a Web browser, read an OPML file and see something meaningful. It also means that the outliner can be used to author HTML code for direct display in a browser. Clearly that's what will make the most sense to the user, so we went that way.

However, in the cloud, on ourfavoritesongs.com, we always serve OPML files as text/xml. That's essential for features like HTML directories, which build on linked OPML documents. If this doesn't make sense, don't worry. It'll usually do what you expect, without you having to think about these issues. I'll add a note to this effect to the OPML spec later today.

Adam Bosworth 

Last night I had dinner with Adam Bosworth, one of the founders of Crossgain. He swore me to secrecy on their plans, but it sounds interesting, we'll cover it here, and we shook hands on working together. I told him if they supported OPML we'd automatically work with them. That was enough for a handshake.

I owe Adam many thanks, when he was at Microsoft he lead their XML work, it was his persistent evangelism in 1997 that got me involved in XML.

I also am friends with their CEO, Todd Nielsen, who I got to know as Microsoft's top developer relations guy. He was in some tough spots, and always had integrity and listened. Good traits for a software CEO.






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