It’s just data
Jon Udell: To ante up for this game, you have to produce well-formed content. The mainstream blog-writing tools aren't helping at all. Most well-formed writing is done in emacs, still. Can we please change that soon?
It can be done with SGML. It can be done with regular expressions. But, in general, I agree. Converging on well formed XML will encourage spontaneous integration.
XML/XHTML WYSIWYCan editors such as Xopus, BXENG/Mozile and even Midas/Epoz are leading the way to well-formed authoring.
Posted by Michael Wechner atHaving worked for a legal publisher, and attempting to automate markup of law citations, I can say that regular expressions leave much to be desired :)
After filtering some new Act by Congress through literally hundreds of patterns we still needed a gaggle of human proofreaders (complete with law degrees) to properly markup citations. Then, another pass with real (aka not HTML) SGML tools to make sure cites matched targets.
Oh... we did "well-formed authoring" by having authors and editors submit either word/wordperfect documents or even hand written notes. Production staff turned it into valid SGML :) Hey, think how that would stimulate the economy if every blogger would hire a markup person!
Posted by Van Gale atToo right. The excuses for not producing well-formed content are rapidly disappearing, even for those of us without a markup person on hand.
Coincidentally (not!) I was looking at how to do WYSIWYG in-browser editing yesterday. I've not looked at making the material from IE well-formed, but I'm pretty sure a dollop of client-side Javascript would be enough.
http://dannyayers.com/archives/001800.html
'Spontaneous' integration of single-domain data (i.e. XHTML content) is pretty trivial. But for this to work cross-domain we need something more, but that's another story... ;-)
Posted by Danny atIf all you want from a blogging tool is to make sure that the xml is well formed, Jesse Ruderman has a solution.
Posted by Jemaleddin S. Cole at