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Dumb XML Question answered
Thursday, July 23, 2009 by Dave Winer.
I just stumbled on an answer to Tuesday's Dumb XML Question. 
If you recall, I wanted to provide a way for users to view the XML of a feed that contains a <cloud> element. I didn't want them to have to do anything like View Source, for a simple reason. I wanted to make it one-click to refresh, so you could quickly see the effect of a change on the XML. I really missed this from the days before the browser vendors hacked up the viewing of RSS in the browser.
1. Add a button to the LifeLiner editing window called View.
2. When the user clicks it, I read the feed XML from the server.
3. Write it out to the local file system with the name preview.xml. Turns out the extension is significant.
4. Send the OS an openDocument message.
5. Voila -- you see the XML as God intended.
Let's hope they don't "fix" this. :-)
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Dave Winer, 54, pioneered the development of weblogs, syndication (RSS), podcasting, outlining, and web content management software; former contributing editor at Wired Magazine, research fellow at Harvard Law School, entrepreneur, and investor in web media companies. A native New Yorker, he received a Master's in Computer Science from the University of Wisconsin, a Bachelor's in Mathematics from Tulane University and currently lives in Berkeley, California.
"The protoblogger." - NY Times.
"The father of modern-day content distribution." - PC World.
One of BusinessWeek's 25 Most Influential People on the Web.
"Helped popularize blogging, podcasting and RSS." - Time.
"The father of blogging and RSS." - BBC.
"RSS was born in 1997 out of the confluence of Dave Winer's 'Really Simple Syndication' technology, used to push out blog updates, and Netscape's 'Rich Site Summary', which allowed users to create custom Netscape home pages with regularly updated data flows." - Tim O'Reilly.
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.Last update: 7/23/2009; 6:05:20 PM Pacific. "It's even worse than it appears."
