Scripting News in XML

Monday, December 15, 1997 by Dave Winer.

Goood morning!

As many people predicted the New Glasses make my neck tight!

Oh man. As my body gets accustomed to the new more complicated vision interface it's making compromises. There are only so many positions that work in each situation. Maybe only one? Whatever.

So my neck is doing work it never had to do before. To keep things in focus it has to hold my eyes in a constant position.

Maybe I should switch back to the old kind of glasses? I'm thinkin about it.

Holiday nerding 

It's mid-way between the two big holidays. Christmas is over, I'm thankful for that, and we have New Year's to look forward to.

In-between is a good time for reading and stretching and maybe learning about something new?

Scripting News 

My home page, http://www.scripting.com/ is like a bibliography for DaveNet.

For example, on Christmas Eve I wrote about the Marx Brothers, and on Scripting News there's a link to a great biography site for four of the Marx Brothers.

DaveNet still reaches further than Scripting News, I think, but Scripting News has been growing steadily since its debut in April 1997.

It's a content flow 

Scripting News is usually updated several times a day.

When I edit the page, it's an outline. I type in items, and render the page from the most recent seven outlines. The whole process is automatic, there's almost no hand-coding of HTML, and that's made it possible for me to create a new flow in a different format, XML.

One of the promises of XML is that it will make it possible to have different kinds of browsers, custom-built to present specialized content flows.

Scripting News is such a specialized flow, but one that's becoming more common. It's a news page, just like the home pages of all the big news websites.

So I decided to take the plunge, and take the chicken out of the chicken and egg problem. Or is it the egg? Who knows. But from now on, Scripting News, in addition to being a HTML web page, is also an XML application.

It's a nice way if you're nerdy to get a quick intro to what XML is about. And if you feel like really nerding out you could write a new kind of browser in Visual Basic or Java or Bongo or Filemaker or whatever. A great long weekend project. Let's have fun!

I hope you check it out.

http://scriptingnews.userland.com/xml/scriptingnews2.xml

Dave Winer

PS: A clear consensus says the years between 2000 and 2009 will be called The Oughts. Example: "Beverly was born in Ought-Five." Or "We sure had a great time in The Oughts."

PPS: I'm cruisin for some schmoozin! If you know any great New Year's parties in the Bay Area, or elsewhere on the west coast, send me a pointer. Private info is OK.