On Tue, Jul 22, 2008 at 07:36:43PM +0200, Filippo Giunchedi wrote:
> Of course the idea of having more updated data is appealing, I'd myself welcome
> RSS/atom feeds per-package (almost the same as PTS' upload news) or
> per-maintainer (either changed-by or upload key or whatever).
Note that I was thinking at generating a big RSS (rotated as needed,
assuming there exists a concept like that for RSS) of all d-d-changes.
Having that, you can define filters on top of it which dynamically
produces the other needed RSS. But sure it depends on who will need to
serve the data, for efficiency reasons ...
> How to proceed for the XML encoding? And what might be the most
> interesting?
I would go for the good old mantra of encoding all the available
information, i.e. simply translating the stanza you already generated to
XML. Given that RSS is often handy to be looked directly at from
browsers, it is probably worth going for a microformat approach
(http://microformats.org), i.e. just use XHTML as your XML language,
and "encode" semantic information using CSS classes as needed.
Quickly drafted example:
<dl>
<dt>source</dt>
<dd class="source-package">netselect</dd>
<dt>version</dt>
<dd class="package-version">0.3.ds1-12.1</dd>
<dt>date</dt>
<dd class="date">Wed, 09 Jul 2008 19:47:21 +0200</dd>
<!-- check what are the used conventions for date in other
microformats ... ->
<dt>changed by</dt>
<dd class="changed-by">Christian Perrier <bubulle@debian.org></dd>
<!-- probably should be structured a bit more, to distinguish email
from name ..., also avoiding annoying escapes -->
<dt>maintainer</dt>
<dd class="maintainer">Filippo Giunchedi <filippo@debian.org>>
<!-- and so on, you got the idea :-) -->
</dl>
This way you get rendering for free in browsers (maybe with just a tiny
bit of CSS) and preserve semantic annotations for who might wants to mix
the data with something else playing along with XML.
Cheers.
--
Stefano Zacchiroli -*- PhD in Computer Science \ PostDoc @ Univ. Paris 7
zack@{upsilon.cc,pps.jussieu.fr,debian.org} -<>- http://upsilon.cc/zack/
I'm still an SGML person,this newfangled /\ All one has to do is hit the
XML stuff is so ... simplistic -- Manoj \/ right keys at the right time
Attachment:
signature.asc
Description: Digital signature