Big Mouth

ajt on 2002-11-05T09:01:48

This months Perl Review is out, and as usual I downloaded a copy, and had a read. While I will confess that sometimes the articles go over my head, on the whole I've found it an interesting read.

This month has something I'm particularly interested in, an article on RSS by brian d foy. In the article there is a brief introduction of RSS, then and example of how to create an RSS feed in Perl and how to convert one to HTML. Very standard, and not dissimilar in method to older articles on perl.com (RSS and You and Create RSS channels from HTML).

There is nothing wrong with the methods used per se, in fact the solution based on XML::RSS is very Perlish. However there is one technical problem- the module though excellent in it's abilities is broken (RT), and one elegance problem- the solution is inelegant when converting RSS to HTML.

When converting from RSS (which is XML) to HTML (which is XML when you use XHTML), a more elegant solution is to use XSL-T. If you happen to have XML sources then the same approach can also be used to go from source (as XML) to RSS. You can use any XSL-T engine you want, but I prefer Matts excellent XML::LibXSLT.

Anyway, I sent an email to The Perl Review, complementing them on the excellent journal, but pointing out an alternative solution to the RSS problem, so it has been suggested that if I think I can do better, then I should write it down as an article for them.....

I don't know if anyone would be interested in reading such an article, and I don't know if brian would wish to publish it, but I think it's about time I contributed back to the community!

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Write it.

koschei on 2002-11-05T09:47:55

Write it. Let the readers decide if it was worth it =)

I doubt TPR will refuse it =)

Re:Write it.

barbie on 2002-11-05T10:07:58

Well this is one reader who'd like to read it.

I'm looking at rewriting some of my backend publishing on a couple of my sites into XML and have been long overdue at looking into XSLT, so I would be very interested in seeing an elegant way of translating XML to XHTML via XSLT :)

I'll publish it

brian_d_foy on 2002-11-05T16:58:11

My article was very simple---the 5 minute introduction to RSS for a person new to the subject. Now that we have published that and readers have played with RSS a bit, you can take them a step further.

I would definately like to see something on the XSLT side.

As far as the XML issues with XML::RSS, why not fix those? I'll help out. :)

Re:I'll publish it

ajt on 2002-11-05T20:17:14

Looks like I'll have to write something now.... Though of course everyone wants to do it now.... Turning HTML into an RSS feed