Thursday, April 18, 2002

Amazon's XML interface not worth the bother... #

Mark Pilgrim provides an incisive analysis why Amazon's XML interface has enough problems to make me interested in playing with it.  To start, it is available to only Amazon associates and is supposed to be used only to build websites to promote amazon products.  No other uses are permitted.  (I'm quite disappointed since I quite like amazon as a source of book information.)   Posted by Raymond Yee on 4/18/02; 6:13:48 PM from the Web Technology dept. Discuss

Mark Pilgrim's experience with OPML #

I sympathize with Mark's experience with OPML -- though I will continue working with OPML despite there not being an official DTD that works.  The lack of an official DTD is, IMHO, a big problem because then there is no such thing as a valid DTD.  I ran into this problem when I wanted to create OPML that would work as a Manila directory and ended up having to guess whether certain parts of an OPML directory is optional.  Very, very frustrating.  Not only that, one ends having to put a lot of extra effort to do ad hoc error checking to work with OPML.   Posted by Raymond Yee on 4/18/02; 1:43:00 PM from the Web Technology dept. Discuss

A SCORM course #
Just a quick glance at this online course on SCORM makes me think that it might be worth sending others on campus to the course.  [link from David Carter-Tod]   Posted by Raymond Yee on 4/18/02; 1:35:59 PM from the Web Technology dept. Discuss

Back to blogging #
I haven't been blogging much recently.  I've been working hard -- both at work and on some other matters, making it difficult to write here.  But I'm back.   Posted by Raymond Yee on 4/18/02; 1:11:54 PM from the Site Notes dept. Discuss