pf » Tag: xml on Pete Freitag's Blog

Foundeo is holding a special promotion through the rest of 2007. We have bundled Foundeo's popular Image Effects Component for ColdFusion 8 along with the full source of our Simple Feed Parser for ColdFusion for $49.99 (you save $139!).

I noticed that Apple is still promoting their blue RSS icon in the marketing material for their new iWeb software in iLife '06. This despite the fact that Microsoft has said that IE will use same feed icon as firefox.

Tim Bray want's to Drop the <!DOCTYPE>, and points to a proposal for XML 2.0.

I have to admit, I always thought XML would be at 1.0 forever, but Tim makes some interesting points:

it's usually a bad idea for a document to express an opinion as to what its own schema is.

Here's the AJAX prototype example that I used in my AJAX presentation today.

I wanted to give an example of a good use of AJAX, and at the same time keep it simple. So I thought a good example

would be to build a zip code verifier.

Here's an outline of the presentation on AJAX that I gave today at my ColdFusion users group meeting.

I've been learning Flex for a presentation at my local CFUG, and I'm actually quite impressed with how much you can do with so little code.

You may have noticed that I've had this solosub button on my site for a while, I launched the solosub service about a while back without telling anyone. I just put the button up on my site, and waited to see if it would catch on. So far I think it has, so let me explain what it is.

If you can learn HTML, you can easily learn how to build your own RSS 2.0 feeds. I'll take you through the steps to creating an RSS feed from scratch.

Step 1: XML Declaration

Since RSS 2.0 must validate as XML, the first line in your rss feed must be the XML declaration.

I have been doing a lot of XML parsing, and manipulation in java lately because I'm building a super dynamic configuration editor for XMS. Its going to be pretty cool once its done because you can even configure third party modules with it.

I just noticed last week that some of the online web aggregators (such as bloglines, newsgator online, live journal, etc) will send the number of subscribers in their HTTP user agent. For example:

NewsGatorOnline/2.0_(http://www.newsgator.com;_20_subscribers)

Bloglines/2.

RSS Feeds have a content type problem. Most people end up serving them with the content-type: text/xml. But this practice is frowned upon for several reasons.

Evagoras Charalambous saw my article Adding a CSS StyleSheet to your RSS Feed and was inspired to create an article called Improving an XML feed display through CSS and XSLT.

The CSS technique I use is easy to implement, and looks pretty good.

According to the W3C the next version of XHTML - is going to "last call real soon now". Steven Pemberton the Chair of the W3C Working Group has posted a presentation on XHTML2 on the W3C web site. The presentation shows some cool new features in XHTML 2...

I've spent the last few hours looking at DocBook, and Apache Forrest two XML documentation frameworks. Basically what these two frameworks let you accomplish is seperate your documentation content from your documentation layout, and display format.

Need to parse the dates in an Atom feed? Atom feeds use ISO 8601 formatted dates, something like this; 1994-11-05T08:15:30-05:00 with a UTC offset, or like this: 1994-11-05T13:15:30Z in GMT.

It's pretty easy to add a CSS stylesheet to your RSS feeds. I created one in about 10 minutes for my RSS feed. You can do a lot more with an XSL stylesheet (turn links into clickable links, etc), but CSS can make your feed look much less scary for the non-technical crowd.

I wrote a web based XPath tool in ColdFusion. The tool will allow you to perform an XPath query on a XML document, it then highlights the results and also dumps the XmlElement returned from the XPath query.

Well thanks to Sean Corfield I understand why I was having issues with namespaces when trying to parse RSS 1.0 with XPath.

If you have a document with namespaces such as RSS 1.

I came across a handy reference article on xml.com today that gives XPath queries for RSS and Atom feeds. Just last week I was attempting to parse a RSS 1.0 feed in CFMX using the XMLSearch function. I'm running into problems however due to the name spaces in RSS 1.

I came up with a code sample to parse RSS with CFMX today based on a question about CFMX XML functions on my local CFUG mailing list. It should do ok with RSS 2.0, and 0.91, and also well formed RSS 0.92. It won't work with RSS 1.0.