Scotty's Engineering Log

Ways to improve blogs.sun.com metadata

The metadata our current blog entries publish with is extremely limited. If we are trying to drive the web towards the Semantic Web, we need to get better about adopting and publishing standard metadata, like the Dublin Core Metadata Initiative.

I work on the Sun System Handbook, and if you look at any of the Full Component List or Service View and Component page sources, you can see what I'm talking about. Here's an example:

<html>
<head profile="http://dublincore.org/documents/dcq-html/">
<title>Sun Fire V880 - Full Components List</title>
<meta http-equiv="Content-type" content="text/html;charset=UTF-8" />
<link href="http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/" rel="schema.DC" />
<link href="http://purl.org/dc/terms/" rel="schema.DCTERMS" />
<meta content="en-US" name="DC.language" />
<meta content="Full Components List" name="DC.type" />
<meta content="Sun Microsystems, Inc." name="DC.publisher" />
<meta content="Sun Parts Repository (SPRuce)" name="DC.creator" />
<meta content="text/html" scheme="DCTERMS.IMT" name="DC.format" />
<meta content="US" name="DC.coverage" />
<meta content="©2003 Sun Microsystems, Inc. All rights reserved." name="DC.rights" />
<meta name="DC.title" content="Sun Fire V880" />
</head>

Depending on how easy it is to modify the Roller software, we should be able to at least put some of the category/keyword, title and other information to help with more accurate search results (if not now, certainly in the future).

(2004-07-14 14:40:23.0) Permalink Comments [2] See also: General

iTunes XML revisited

Thanks to some useful comments from Norm Walsh, I was able to make some major strides in transforming iTunes' pracically useless XML.

Due to the way Apple chose to structure the iTunes XML playlist export, I ran into some problems with Norm's approach: I kept getting invalid QName errors on some of the elements. Turns out, it was trying to create element names based only on the track number.

I hacked around and here is the resulting stylesheet: itunes.xslt

I still need to set up the XML pipeline, as Norm suggested, but for now, here is a simple output stylesheet as well: playlist.xslt

I plan to handle most of the formatting with CSS at a later date.

The only problem with this XSL, is that I've now lost the order of the original playlist. I imagine this could be solved with keys and sorting, but I just don't have time to mess with this further.

Hope you enjoy this! I'll be posting my playlists much more easily now.

BTW, I used Michael Kay's Saxon 8.0 for the transformations!

(2004-07-14 13:44:42.0) Permalink See also: Music



Scotty's Engineering Log Scott Hudson's blog on XML, DocBook, Sci-Fi and Storm Chasing