Comments

3 responses to “links for 2008-02-10”

1. 2008/02/14

   Wayne Horkan

   Hi Alec,

   Both of these links look at what people are commonly calling ‘Web Scapping’ and ‘Transclusion’, that is the inclusion of web page content from a variety of sources in another page. I’m not sure that the world and his dog will wait to use RSS (or Atom) as a medium to enable this functionality though.

   The good old W3C have a working draft for this called “Access Control for Cross-site Requests” here:

   http://www.w3.org/TR/access-control/

   The nice people over at Mozilla.org have been kind enough to include this functionality in Firefox 3 (beta) saying “create impressive browser-based mashups” as described in the feature list here:

   http://developer.mozilla.org/en/docs/Firefox_3_for_developers

   It does this by invoking the javascript XMLHttpRequest object, more on this here:

   http://developer.mozilla.org/en/docs/XMLHttpRequest

   If you don’t want to wait for this functionality to be included in the new generation of browsers, or you want browser backwards compatibility, then there’s always JQuery:

   http://jquery.com/

   Here’s a nice example of JQuery being used to web scrap digg (plus you don’t have to pay Dapper anything) over here:

   http://code.google.com/p/diggstripper/

   I’ve been hacking around with JQuery lately, although I haven’t deployed it in anger yet and I think our own Peter Reiser has been working with JQuery internally too.

   You’re right though – this is the most exciting area to emerge recently and will have a incredible impact on the way sites are displayed to include content from multiple sources.

   The inevitable shopping sites will start to appear that blend multiple shop fronts and it’s only a matter of time before some wag creates a Burroughsesque cut-up like mash up blog thang of course…

   All the best,

   Wayne

   Reply
2. 2008/02/15

   alecm

   Hi Wayne,

   I am seeing great opportunities in legacy websites like Sun’s OJP page. We need feeds of that crap, and where the wem managers do not see fit to provide them, they can now be taken…

   This is what I believe is most exciting. 🙂

   Reply
3. 2008/02/15

   Wayne Horkan

   Too Right…

   lol

   Reply