Re: linux news project impressions

[Roger Dingledine <arma@mit.edu>]

In message <35E2B7F0.44D60103@appliedtheory.com>, blizzard@appliedtheory.com writes:
>Roger Dingledine wrote:
>> 
>> Anybody want to give a shot at a pleasing layout for the news submission
>> page? I'll take care of doing the cgi-perl backend that turns it into
>> html-formatted text, and then I'll get Chris to tell me what's missing
>> between that and xml so we can get it "right".
> 
>Turns into html-formatted text?  You don't put it into a database?  I
>hate to say it but parsing that out of html is going to be a pain in the
>butt. :)  Personally, I generate html from the database.  Do you have
>access to such facilities?

Ok, I'm probably throwing around the wrong terms. I was thinking of taking
the fields from the web form, and throwing markup around them to end up
with xml that can be handed to sites that want to hear about the submissions.

But it sounds like you might still disagree with me. :) Are you proposing
that I keep a database on the same site as the submission page, store it
directly from submission to the database, and then do a conversion in order
to mail it to participating sites? (I'm presuming that we'll want to use
mail initially, until we solve the infrastructure issue. Is that a bad
assumption?)

>> Once that has happened, then we'll start examining what people need to do
>> to automate their "news feed" at their site, as well as providing some
>> generic xml->useful_text programs (hopefully Chris can help with identifying
>> some programs that would be handy there).
>
>That's not tough.  There are quite a few xml parsers out there.  There
>are even some perl based ones using Jim Clark's expat.
>
>> Anyway..anybody here good with graphics layout? It doesn't have to be
>> perfect -- it just has to be good enough for people to start commenting
>> on it.
>> 
>> (Wow, it's been a long time since I've done cgi.)
>> Thanks,
>> --Roger
>
>It hasn't been long enough since I've done cgi. :)
>
>--Chris

--Roger