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

Dictionary on the Control Panel

Author:Dave Winer
Posted:2/18/1999; 8:25:43 AM
Topic:RPC-based previewing
Msg #:2989 (In response to 2987)
Prev/Next:2988 / 2990

More magic. I have a suite that connects to WordNet, parses the HTML it returns and puts a little dictionary in my console window. I'm also caching the results, so over time we'll get a mirror of their dictionary in a Frontier guest database. I read their license agreement and it seems to permit it.

At first I was going to use dictionary.com, but they have a weasel that sniffs out my HTTP requests and returns the definitions it has for the word "nothing". I tried and tried to work around them, and then I noticed that they were using WordNet, so I changed it to work with the princeton.edu site and they have no weasel, so goodbye dictionary.com. Too bad, I was going to promote their service.

One more thing, the code for suites.netDictionary is attached as an enclosure to this message. Have fun!



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