Edited by author 09-06-2002 01:43 AM
Status of effort:
My initial implementation plan was to have users access a web site to register a discussion thread, grab generated RDF from this site, and post it into their posting. This would include RDF/XML decribing the discussion thread, as well as links to ThreadNeedle to generate RDF for use by others wanting to reply to the specific posting.
Well, sounds good but has problems.
First problem is, as has been discussed, RDF embedding into HTML bodies is a problem. The processor will display data contained in elements and the only way to avoid this is to surround the RDF in a script tag or to use such simple RDF that all of the relevant data can be described as attributes of an element. Regardless -- using the RDF will prevent the web page from validating.
Still, this will work, except for a second problem -- weblogging tools want to add white space HTML to all content, and if you past RDF into the posting space, HTML breaks will be added. This will break RDF parsers (the XML is no longer valid RDF at that point). The only way around this is to no have line breaks in the generated code (not workable) or to turn on automatic line breaks (not feasible for most webloggers).
With the release of MovableType's TrackBack, they did highlight another option I hadn't considered (too close to problem, too dense, or both), which is to embed the RDF into the template rather than the posting, and use the weblogging tool's template tags to provide the relevant data (URL, title, author, date). This is great, except for one thing: ThreadNeedle isn't tracking postings, it's tracking dialog threads.
A dialog thread is one person writing a posting about another posting, providing link to same. Sounds simple, but there is nothing that tracks these threads outside Daypop or Blogdex, and they only track one level's worth.
I can embed RDF into the templates and this works great, but there is no way to embed the fact that a posting is related to another posting.
So, I have and am looking at yet more options. Among these is just plain scanning weblogs for links, keeping a record of the URLs and then gradually build the dialog when new postings come in that contain these links. This is how Daypop works, except we would show linkages beyond one level. This approach is very workable, but it will be data and space intensive -- too intensive for my machine and I can't afford another upgrade.
To be honest, I also don't like the idea because it's just plain inelegant. ThreadNeedle is for tracking dialog threads, not postings. It doesn't really care about individual postings. The data store would be full of postings that aren't part of a dialog, taking up space. Even with a garbage scheme, the solution is inelegant.
There's another simple solution, technically, and that is create a form, have people input their posting URL and the URL they're replying to, forget all the folderol and just show the discussion. This is trivial technically, except that we're centralizing the solution, which I wanted to avoid, and people have to add discussion threads. I'm finding that webloggers really don't want to have to manually screw with things. Their interests fall considerably if the process isn't automated.
Another problem with this goes back to AKMA's concern about garbage being introduced. As you can see from this Quicktopic, with a certain teoti, anybody can attach anything. This happened to me with trackback when someone, accidentally I believe, did a trackback to one of my postings from theirs that had nothing to do with what I wrote.
The earlier discussed approach of scanning for links would prevent some of this bogus dialog stranding because you would have to have a physical link in the posting for the dialog.
I thought about piggy backing the technology on to Ben & Mena's Trackback (Movable Type at
http://www.movabletype.org) especially with their new stand alone server. But again, there is some complexity associated with this for the webloggers, more than I think many are going to be comfortable with.
Another area of concern with this technology is it does require CGI on the webloggers site, which won't work for Blogspot (and other webloggers without CGI access). We could host a server for those folks, and then working on utilizing the TB pinging. An option.
(I've been chatting with the BlogMD people at
http://www.truthlaidbear.com/blogmd/forum/viewforum.php?f=1. They're facing many of these same problems.)
Sorry, I wish I had something I could go "fini!" and throw out to the world, but I've about exhausted all my ideas and technical bag of tricks. So I'm throwing this out to the discussion group to see if anyone can spot something that I'm too tired or too dense to notice. Otherwise, outside of seeing what I can leverage on Ben & Mena's effort (and kudos to them in their generosity in making this technology available freely), I'm fresh out of ideas and ThreadNeedle ends with the RDF schema and no implementation.
