This weekend’s recreational programming project involved PlanetPlanet and ensuring that there is adequate support for Atom. And there’s nothing like live data to help identify integration issues.
First of all, implementors of anything Atom-related need to spend some time chez Jacques Distler; in particular, the conversation that plays out in the comments. Second, there’s this piece of software called Planet Planet that allows you to make an...
The API of the Universal Feed Parser is constructed in such a way that escaping errors are quickly made. Values in an API should never have both plain text and HTML text as possible values at the same time!
value and type should be deprecated, and plainValue, htmlValue and xhtmlValue should be added, with proper conversions between them.
The link to Phil R’s feed and blog are broken (the feed icon links to his blog, his name is a link without an href attribute). The OPML is broken correspondingly.
J$: consider it on the todo list. I need to figure out more what this templating engine is capable of before I tackle that. At the moment, I’m more focused on fixing bugs.
Sjoerd: I’m not sure that type should be deprecated, but I did end up building what amounts to two of those three functions you describe. If others have similar needs, perhaps this function could be added to Feed Parser. Example use case: many people escape titles so that they can have convenient access to HTML entity definitions. Such an escaped title can be readily placed into header elements, but can not readily be placed directly into the value of a title attribute.
Phil: Fixed, thanks. The OPML provided with Planet probably needs some attention by somebody as it doesn’t have attributes like type and title.
Lots of cool stuff going on in Planet land at the moment. Mary Gardiner sat down with Rob Collins to add some much needed unit testing love to Planet, and is looking into a bit of sanity-inducing refactoring and optimisation as well. Sam Ruby has...
I recently tried converting HTML to plain text and vice-versa for FeedTools, but it turned out to be quite difficult without a better way of escaping/unescaping things. And I don’t really have a good enough understanding of Unicode to figure out how to go from the numeric character entities to the raw bytes without the aid of a library. Which doesn’t seem to exist for Ruby.
And I don’t really have a good enough understanding of Unicode to figure out how to go from the numeric character entities to the raw bytes without the aid of a library. Which doesn’t seem to exist for Ruby.
I’ve been a little lazy not updating recent Plagger development. Don’t mind. It doesn’t mean Plagger development has been squeezed, but it’s actually still very hot. Looks like Planet Planet added Atom support recently. Plagger also has a nice...
It appears that Planet Intertwingly discards language metadata. My latest feed item has both Finnish and English content—both properly marked up. The language metadata is not present on the Planet Intertwingly front page or in the aggregated feed.
I can’t think of any concrete reason why this should matter in this case. (Finnish—like English—is on the top of the Mozilla UTF-8 font selection pecking order, and I am not aware of real voice browsing use cases.) However, this would make a difference with e.g. Polish or Korean in some circumstances. (Probably not the main use case for Planet Intertwingly, but could be relevant to PlanetPlanet anyway. :-)
P.S. The spell checker does not know about Intertwingly and Mozilla.
I’ve been a little lazy not updating recent Plagger development. Don’t mind. It doesn’t mean Plagger development has been squeezed, but it’s actually still very hot. Looks like Planet Planet added Atom support recently. Plagger also has a nice...