It’s just data
Jacques Distler: A recent Wired article to the effect that the National Weather Service is now offering their data in XML format got me intrigued enough to want to test out the service.
Double encoded, ill-formed weather forecasts, via POST.
For those who don't have SOAP::Lite installed, here's a LWP version.
But that's so much simpler than double encoded, ill-formed RDF in a SOAP wrapper. You can tell it's simpler because it doesn't have a namespace. You should write a program that takes their output, encodes it again, and puts it in an OPML attribute. They don't have namespaces either, so it's a perfect match.
Seriously though, it's just a matter of time before someone writes an ultra-liberal weather parser. And then the dream of interoperability of weather data at the purely syntactic level will be utterly shattered. I'd volunteer to shatter it, but I'm a little busy these days.
Posted by Mark atAh, but then there's the power of the Blogosphere. The National Weather Service's Director of Internet Services chimed in to say they'd fix it.
Be cynical, if you want, but that seems pretty responsive to me.
Posted by Jacques Distler atHere is another way to try and examine the results of this service. Check out the various visualizations of the response message, especially 'pseudocode' and 'raw' views.
Posted by Mark Ericson at