Netscape's XML App

Saturday, October 24, 1998 by Dave Winer.

Yesterday I got an email from Jeff Veen at Wired pointing me to the server that Netscape is running its What's Related? application on. This server is part of the project they did with Alexa Internet, and it's the back-end for the What's Related? feature in Netscape 4.5.

I had a little time to kill, was looking for a diversion, so I sent a message to Netscape's server via script and I was blown away. It's XML! Yes it is. And why, oh why, didn't they tell anyone? (Or did I miss something?)

Anyway, I wrote an app that talks to their server. It interfaces thru an HTML form. You enter the URL of a site, and I find out what's related, with a twist. The URL to the related site links back to the form, and I do a lookup on *that* site, allowing you to interactively walk their tree of relationships.

This is just a demonstration. I want to be sure that people interested in building XML apps have a way to experience the XMLness of what Netscape has done, which is very interesting, for sure.

Here's the link to my app:

http://nirvana.userland.com/whatsRelated/

Hope you like it!

Absence makes the heart do what? 

Oh baby, so sorry to be gone for so long.

Sometimes the most important thing is being heard.

And sometimes it's most important to say nothing.

For the last four weeks I haven't had much to say. I've been busy and quiet and more productive than I can remember ever being. What am I doing? Building cool servers and editors, of course!

Stay tuned...

Dave Winer