XML for More Like This Web Log

If you're here following an external link, just a heads up that the material in this page has been deprecated for some time now. I'm no longer publishing a syndication feed in this format.

10 February 1999: Dave Winer's put out a call for web loggers to work on an XML DTD we can use for sharing information. Here's an almost there DTD for the XML version of More Like This.

25 November 2001: The DTD changed. Date is now a container.

	<!DOCTYPE morelikethis [

	<!ELEMENT morelikethis (date+, error?)>
	<!ELEMENT link (update?, title, url, description, meta)>
	<!ELEMENT date (link+)>
	<!ELEMENT update (#PCDATA)>
	<!ELEMENT title (#PCDATA)>
	<!ELEMENT url (#PCDATA)>
	<!ELEMENT description (#PCDATA)>
	<!ELEMENT meta (category+)>
	<!ELEMENT category (#PCDATA)>
	<!ELEMENT error (#PCDATA)>
	<!ATTLIST date timestamp CDATA #REQUIRED>

	]>

In practice, text in a description element is marked up as HTML. Therefore I don't link a DTD to the output of the XML version of the "Web Log".

What Each Site Adds

The concept I add, as well as Raphael Carter and the Memepool, is metadata on links. I handle that in the DTD. At the time I pull a page, I could subsitute for the URL that handles the meta query version of the More Like This base URL. (See http://www.whump.com/moreLikeThis/metaXML.php3?meta=XML for example.)

In his Scripting News DTD (http://www.scripting.com/dtd/scriptingNews.dtd), Dave Winer avoids embedding markup by including an element called linetext. He can then search and replace the link text with an HTML anchor with the URL at the time he renders the page.

Extending the DTD

Entries in a Web Log aren't always links. Jorn Barger and Dave Winer will have commentary without links.

We need to support abbreviated links, like those at the top of Robot Wisdom.

There are also the source links which we use. Raphael's got that formalized in Honeyguide. Here's an idea that Frontier would be great at: Glossary Subsitution via XML-RPC.