[XML-SIG] XBEL DTD

[Andrew M. Kuchling]

Marc van Grootel writes:
>For the purpose of discussion I added my attempt
>at what is dubbed the XBEL DTD.
>I took Mark Hammond's as a starting point.
>I scoped it a little wider and included most features
>of the Netscape bookmark format. Between MSIE and NS
	
	What was the group's reaction to Marc's revised DTD?  I saw no
problems with it; while it makes the format a bit more complicated, it
seems to be required in order to support lossless conversion from
Netscape format.

	I like this little effort, and the XBEL programs will make a
good demo to include with the XML software.  To that end, I've written
a little program to read Lynx bookmarks and generate the corresponding
XBEL (using Mark's original DTD).

	Given that various people have already written programs to
convert Netscape or IE bookmarks to XBEL, we now only need something
to convert an XBEL document to an attractive HTML version, to make it
easy to display our bookmark lists on the Web.  Displaying XBEL files
could be done with XSL, or with the XML rendering features in Mozilla,
but that would limit the potential user base greatly; rendering to
HTML seems the obvious course to follow.

	Longer-term, what applications are enabled if you have lots of
people's bookmark files in a machine-readable form.  You could build a
high-quality list of links by finding the most commonly linked-to
pages; I can't think of any other use off the top of my head.

-- 
A.M. Kuchling			http://starship.skyport.net/crew/amk/
I am not here to mourn him. I mourned the loss of my love a long time ago. I
am here to say goodbye to a stranger who once did me a good turn. And to the
man who gave my son the death he craved.
    -- Calliope, in SANDMAN #71, part two of "The Wake"