Friends of Bill
One answer to the puzzling question of just exactly what it should mean to say that you “know” someone in the FOAF sense: Bill Kearney’s RSS 1.0 for Radio tool adds a section of FOAF at the end of the RSS feed, saying that you know him.
Would this be spam RDF?
I claim source credit for the phrase ”Is he a real friend of yours, or a FoaF kind of friend?”
Well at least someone’s looking at the output.
To that end I’ve updated the tool to allow you to control listing me. That and it now allows you to specify your own FoaF file URL here.
You can find the latest copy here:
http://www.ideaspace.net/users/wkearney/misc/radio/radio8/rdf/
The XML for this page doesn’t parse.
http://philringnalda.com/archives/002338.xml
Using characters from ISO-8859-1 need to indicate it in the document declaration. Otherwise you need to transcode them into UTF-8.
Ah, good catch – thanks. I fixed the main feed once I noticed Kaf clobbering it, but it looks like I forgot the individual archive feeds.
That would make a very nice MT plugin, a global attribute to translate to a particular encoding (especially if it could recognize and translate pasted in MS cruft). Too bad it’s well beyond my Perl skillz.
Indeed, transcoding seems simple until you realize there are hundreds of different encoding possibilities.
It IS possible to get it figured out. But the grunt work to do it seems to be more than most developers care to tackle.
You start by accepting text. You can negotiate with the incoming browser to see what encoding/language it’s using. You could use that as a baseline for how to start your transcoding. You could also try to ’force’ the incoming browser to use your encoding. Most will try to play along. Then once you’ve got that info there’d have to be a set of local tables from that encoding to your desired format.
So if a browser shows up running windows-1254 and you’re storing in UTF-8 then you’d need to have a 1254-to-UTF-8 transcoding table available. And there’s more to ISO-8859 that just the the ISO-8859-1 format. There’s ISO-8859-2 and up to -16 I think. Yeah, it’s a pain in the ass; bigger than you’d initially think.
But starting with just accepting ISO-8859-1 and transcoding it to UTF-8 is going to cover a staggering majority of feeds.
We live in a multilingual world. It’s about time developers stopped being lazy about supporting more than just euro-centric languages.