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by Phillip Pearson.
Original Post: Structured Blogging is official
Feed Title: Second p0st
Feed URL: http://www.myelin.co.nz/post/rss.xml
Feed Description: Tech notes and web hackery from the guy that brought you bzero, Python Community Server, the Blogging Ecosystem and the Internet Topic Exchange
(But first, I should mention again the other developers working on the project - the people who wrote most of the code: Kimbro Staken [MCD libraries, WP plugin, Amazon/etc lookups], Chad Everett [MT plugin] and Shelley Powers [outputthis.org]. And of course Marc Senasac [UI design] and Marc Canter [microcontent mastermind].)
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Rohit Khare of CommerceNet is happy SB now uses microformats. The plugin still does the XML-inside-<script> thing, but it's no longer the only way of getting access to the structured data. It's up to developers to choose: some will prefer to read the XML chunk for the convenience, or to get as much depth as possible from a structured blog entry, while others will go for maximum reach by looking at the microformatted data.
That said, the MCD system is fairly flexible, so if you want to make an forms-style application that generates a particular format of XML, you may be able to define an MCD file to do it for you... which you can then send off to other people using the SB plugin, who will make posts using the MCD, which you then aggregate. In that case microformats, or anyone else's standard, aren't relevant - you just want a convenient way to publish some XML which you or your company cares about. If it turns into something other people want to work with, then you can define a microformat for it, and change the MCD to support that.
Both of these pieces mention the invalid XHTML / RSS we're generating. Oops! The XHTML is a known problem; Danny Ayers noticed it a week or so ago and I did some work to get the then-current code to generate XHTML that was valid XML, but the validator is a bit pickier and it complains loudly when you put any unknown elements in the document, even if they're inside <script> tags. IMHO this is a problem with the validator (check this out: Line 78 column 190: there is no attribute "xmlns"!), but maybe I just don't know my XHTML well enough, so if anyone can enlighten me as to how to get the validator to not complain about what seems to me to be properly namespaced XML, please leave a comment here.
I see that we've slipped a little since that point and are now publishing XHTML that is invalid XML as well. I'll make sure that gets fixed.
I wasn't aware of the invalid RSS, but it looks like that will be pretty trivial to fix the real issues there - we'll just skip generating the <enclosure> element unless the file size and file type are properly filled out (in future: detected) and make all the URLs absolute. The warning about the <script> is more troublesome, but we'll sort something out.
Rod Boothby wants to get involved. Rod, what you want to do is download one of the plugins and take a look at the MCD files that define the structured data. You might be able to leverage one of the plugins to collect some of the data you want, and to put it into the XML format you want.
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Bernard Moon from GoingOn mentions the announcement. The GoingOn Network will include structured publishing using the Structured Blogging system, I think. GoingOn sponsored the UI development... although I had to tone it down quite a bit to make it fit in to WP and MT :-)
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Yiibu is in... we've been having a good conversation about how this all fits together with their concept of 'stacking' smaller bits of content together to create meaningful stuff.
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