[XML-SIG] XBEL metadata question

[Fred L. Drake, Jr.]

  Regarding the question about where to put page-embedded metadata, I
think a recommendation for a specific application name can be made in
the XBEL documentation.  The recommendation should probably include a
way to state the last date the data was modified and that, if
modified, all old data should be removed (even if an updated value
isn't available; say a metadata field is removed from the document).
  Another possibility is a DTD change that gives specific structure:
<docmeta> (or whatever) could allow (meta | link)+, where <meta> and
<link> are defined as for HTML 4.0/XHTML ?.?.  The biggest problem I'd 
have with this is that software would have to be updated to deal with
it, and I don't currently have time to update & re-release Grail
(which I'd consider a requirement, at for myself).
  Is anyone actually using Grail with XBEL, or is everyone doing
things independently of the browser?

Chad Loder writes:
 > 	If 301 moved, add note about old URL and change href (and check
 > 	new href)

  I thought about adding this kind of update into Grail when
encountering a permanent move of a page in Grail, if the original was
bookmarked, but never got around to it.

 > 	Else if succesful, get title and description from page. If
 > 	bookmark title was missing, set title. If bookmark description
 > 	was missing, set description. Also set lastVisited date.

  Do you really want to set lastVisited?  Setting lastModified is
useful since it tells the user it changed since the last time they
visited it, but if lastVisited gets modified as well, they can't
tell.  I see lastVisited as a user-centered bit of data.  See the XBEL 
documentation:

http://www.python.org/topics/xml/xbel/docs/html/top-level.html#SECTION000451000000000000000

 > I could also use the HTTP header Last-Modified to set the lastModified
 > date. It's just a matter of writing some code to convert HTTP (GMT)
 > style datetimes into ISO8601 datetimes.

  There's code to parse the HTTP Last-Modified the Grail source:

http://grail.python.org/

 > I also wrote a tool which publishes an XBEL file into a web site looking
 > much like Yahoo or Open Directory. You can see a sample at:
 > 
 > 	http://www.ccs.neu.edu/home/cloder/ie_favorites
 > 
 > What would be nice is a folder metadata called dmozCategory which maps
 > each folder onto its closest Open Directory category (www.dmoz.org). This
 > would allow separate collections to be merged together automatically.

  This would be cool!


  -Fred

--
Fred L. Drake, Jr.	  <fdrake at acm.org>
Corporation for National Research Initiatives