Mon, Jul 02, 2007
purple-include: Granular Transclusions for the Common Man #
Many thanks to JonathanCheyer, CraigLatta, and KaliyaHamlin for coming to the HyperScope sprint this past weekend, and special thanks to ChristinaEngelbart for hosting. Also thanks to ThomCherryhomes and others who hung out with us on IRC. The notes from the day are up on the Wiki, and I put up some pictures as well. (MEL)
The big news, though, is that Brad, Jonathan, and I wrote a cool hack called purple-include, based on MarkNottingham's most excellent hinclude. It lets you transclude granular chunks of content from any web site by using an img-like tag. Check out the examples. I think this will go a long way in making TransClusions more common on the Web. (MEN)
You address granular content either by using a fragment identifier that the document author provides (such as a PurpleNumber) or by using an XPath expression. Thanks to TonyChang for his cool interactive XPath tester. (MEO)
The planned next step is to create a Firefox plugin that adds a "Transclude" option when you right click inside of a browser text widget. This will allow you to transclude copied content, rather than paste it. Don't know whether any of us will get to this soon, so we encourage the lazy web and all you Firefox hackers to beat us to the punch. (MEP)
This was my first non-trivial foray into JavaScript, and I was disturbed by what I saw. The language itself is not horrible, although its object system makes Perl 5 look like SmallTalk. What's shameful is its API support. We had to use a very ugly, although apparently common hack to get a DOM of external web pages. This is pure silliness. The browser is already doing the hard work of parsing broken HTML and XML and turning it into a DOM. Why not easily expose that functionality to the developer? (MEQ)
As Brad dryly noted, "Welcome to my world." (MER)
/tech/purple | Posted at 11:36pm
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