Technorati's Attention.xml

26 December, 2004

I’m sure they mean well. But really.

When you say something like attention.xml will be simple, minimalist, and easy to use and implement and your (fairly minimal) example looks like this:

<li><a href="permalink or guid" rel="votelink">title</a>
        <dl><dt>lastread</dt><dd>ISO-8601 date</dd>
            <dt>duration</dt><dd>seconds value</dd>
            <dt>followedlinks</dt>
            <dd><ul><li><a href="http://example.com/1">link1</a></li>
                    <li><a href="http://example.com/2">link2</a></li></ul></dd>
        </dl>
</li>

Then excuse me if I don’t laugh in your face too hard.

See other posts tagged with general and all posts made in December 2004.

Comments

David

26 December, 2004 at 06:51

That’s a pretty maximal example. A minimal example is a simple OPML subscription file – that is perfectly valid attention.xml.

Dave

Pip

26 December, 2004 at 15:35

Unless you want it as a standalone XHTML page presumably, in which case your minimal example would seem to balloon to:

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd”>
<html xmlns=”http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml” lang=”en” xml:lang=”en”>
<head profile=”http://developers.technorati.com/wiki/xhtmloutlines”>
<title>An attention.xml file</title>
<meta http-equiv=”content-type” content=”text/html; charset=iso-8859-1″ />
</head>
<body>
<li><a href=”permalink or guid” rel=”votelink”>title</a> <dl><dt>lastread</dt><dd>ISO-8601 date</dd>

<dt>duration</dt><dd>seconds value</dd>
<dt>followedlinks</dt>
<dd><ul><li><a href=”http://example.com/1″>link1</a></li>
<li><a href=”http://example.com/2″>link2</a></li></ul></dd>
</dl>
</li>
</body>
</html>

(which would instantly fail validation btw because the list elements aren’t contained by anything, and the spec doesn’t appear to specify what should contain them)

and if you don’t want it to be a standalone XHTML page, why not just use a custom XML language?

Liking the nested list structure – so human readable! People won’t make mistakes creating that!

I’m sure attention.xml has a market somewhere, but that market is not me.