The Null Device
Posts matching tags 'xml'
2005/10/4
Civilization IV, the latest in the highly addictive game series, is coming soon, and looks interesting; other than the gameplay, it will be extensively customisable using XML-based data and Python scripting. Ht's probably just as well that there is an organisation such as Civilization Anonymous; I suspect they'll be busy.
(via worldchanging, 433) ¶ 3
2003/8/25
The LJ Times, a generative art hack which populates a newspaper-style page with random LiveJournal entries and Associated Press photographs. Quite amusing.
(Hmmm... the LiveJournal XML feeds offer a veritable cornucopia, or perhaps an Augean stable, of postings, most of them all but meaningless to people who don't know the poster, and thus functionally indistinguishable from computer-generated text or cut-up art. (The blogosphere at large can be said to have similar properties, though not all of it is in one convenient location.) I'm surprised more artists haven't harnessed these founts of commentary to power generative-art installations.)
2003/7/5
I was wondering: is there a XML/RSS schema/namespace/&c for publishing lists of upcoming events (i.e., gigs, performances, film screenings and the like)? I think there should be something like that; that way, artists and/or venues could publish lists of upcoming events on their sites in the format, and others could use aggregators to automatically gather their favourite artists' gigs and what's on at their local haunts into customised gig guides.
I'd write one up myself, only my XML-fu is probably not yet up to it.
2003/6/22
FOAF is a way of specifying personal information about a person, including nicknames, links to homepages and lists of people they know, in a XML document. The result is machine-readable "semantic web" homepages which can be traversed, forming social networks; in other words, something like Friendster, only open, XML-based and without the emphasis on bootywhang (though surely someone will come up with a namespace for that in due time), and traversable by any of the countless FOAF browsers due to be written in Perl, Python and Java any day now, or by the web-based FOAF Explorer; if your browser does SVG, there's even a graphical network browser there you can use.
So how do you make yourself a FOAF document? You can get started with the FOAF-A-Matic (Javascript required). (thanks, cos)
2003/1/3
Via Richard's blog, a USENET rant on why XML is evil. It meanders a bit, in the classic crackpot sense (the extension of the metaphor of XML as a bad child into a reference to diaper fetishism, segueing into a digression on why Americans like big breasts, is but one example), but I must say I agree somewhat with the sentiment; to whit, XML is useful as a markup language for text, but putting everything in XML (as some are advocating) is just silly. For one, for most things, there is too much syntactic overhead compared with other formats, and the idea seems to suffer from the Microsoft Fallacy (i.e., the assumption that clock cycles are too cheap to care about and may be squandered at will).
(I was thinking recently of the data format for a project I've been working on (more info on that later), and was toying with making it XML-based; after all, everybody else is doing it, aren't they? Though I'll probably make it some sort of Python-like pseudocode notation, or something otherwise lighter.)
2000/9/15