We showed off a re-skinned version of our Ångströ project at eTech in San Diego that I hope makes a bit more sense as microsearch… you know, for microformats. :)
We pointed at a live instance at http://tpd.angstro.net:19988/ — go search, grab the miffy bookmarkley, and start adding microformats to our big shared pile of bits!
Congratulations for an applause-winning demo to Ben Sittler, as the mad Javascript genius behind the whole system, and Elias Sinderson, who added semi-structured XQuery to the system!
Herewith, some notes from our slides…
What is “Atomic-Scale”?
- Web pages contain chunks of information
- A natural consequence of growing adoption of template languages & content management tools
- Feeds create the illusion of immediacy
- As chunks of information change, we can expect notification (in the form of updated feed files)
- Microformats create the illusion of structure
- Even if it’s HTML all the way down, we can read it
- … so maybe REST will make more sense for atoms than for pages
How miffy works
- walks through the document looking for the ‘root classes’ of the µfs it knows about
- places green anchor boxes in front of them
using css — no graphics, since we want it to work offline - ‘capturing’ clones those DOM nodes, then walks the tree to “reformulate” it
- the only data structure that can represent all future µfs is the DOM itself
For More Information
- Is Open Source —
but not yet an open-repository - grab snapshots of the code and our Subversion archive from our wiki: https://commerce.net/wiki/tpd
- Uses Open Source
-
- Depends on some other OS projects you’ll need
- DBXml from Sleepycat Software
- BeautifulSoup by Leonard Richardson
- Feedparser by Mark Pilgrim
- … and (not least!) Twisted by TwistedMatrix
- Test Service
- Running at http://tpd.angstro.net:19988