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Re: Questions about libx
by Ross Singer
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On 4/28/06, Jeremy Dunck <jdunck@...> wrote:
This is a very good point (and why, ultimately, I gave up on development of WAG the Dog). Certainly the widespread adoption of parseable cues, such as COinS or microformats, would help considerably. Until then, it's constantly a matter of keeping up with what's breaking (and writing new scrapers for new services that appear in the wild). I found I didn't have the energy or the interest to do this and the introduction of LibX gave me an easy out :).
I would really love to see something like this. The nice part of the library world (well, it's actually very frustrating, but this is one advantage) is that the low number of actual vendors means that creating libraries for services that don't have a standards based interface for is fairly small. Such a clearinghouse might serve the double purpose of informing people how to actually implement (and use) standards based approaches to their services.
Then again, nobody may contribute to it and it will wither on the vine, like so many other initiatives in the past. However, I'm encouraged by the work that Ryan Eby, David Walker and Rob Casson have done to form a similar community around the III XMLOPAC: http://wiki.lib.muohio.edu/xmlopac/index.php/Main_Page
It would be nice to see similar efforts for other products.
-Ross.
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I'm sure there are hundreds of working user scripts on us.o, but it's
not obvious which are which. That's kind of the point-- there are two
things at work here. There's the perception of GM's fragility and in
that sense, I think LibX is really in the same ballpark. You're still
depending on DOM manipulation on a known tree-- you're just less
likely to break since OPAC upgrades are few and far between. A user
script coded against an OPAC would be similarly stable. ;-)
This is a very good point (and why, ultimately, I gave up on development of WAG the Dog). Certainly the widespread adoption of parseable cues, such as COinS or microformats, would help considerably. Until then, it's constantly a matter of keeping up with what's breaking (and writing new scrapers for new services that appear in the wild). I found I didn't have the energy or the interest to do this and the introduction of LibX gave me an easy out :).
The second thing is that you're making a domain-specific page
modifier, and (as I hope I've made clear) I think that's useful.
(I also think it'd be nice if an library-related code library came out
of this. Dealing with the various OPAC flavors, xISBN, OpenURL, and
COiNS could, I think, be usefully abstracted for extensions other than
LibX.)
I would really love to see something like this. The nice part of the library world (well, it's actually very frustrating, but this is one advantage) is that the low number of actual vendors means that creating libraries for services that don't have a standards based interface for is fairly small. Such a clearinghouse might serve the double purpose of informing people how to actually implement (and use) standards based approaches to their services.
Then again, nobody may contribute to it and it will wither on the vine, like so many other initiatives in the past. However, I'm encouraged by the work that Ryan Eby, David Walker and Rob Casson have done to form a similar community around the III XMLOPAC: http://wiki.lib.muohio.edu/xmlopac/index.php/Main_Page
It would be nice to see similar efforts for other products.
-Ross.
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Libx mailing list
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