Gopher NG

Following on from the earlier post re. outliners, if we're talking about Gopher done with XML over HTTP, it might as well exploit some of the other facilities that have become readily available since 1992.

GopherNG

So for a start, the nodes in an outline editor/viewer may just expand to show other local DOM tree node…

…or they may provide links that can be followed in the usual browser fashion

…or, they may transclude outlines found at the target URI, identifiable as by

<head profile="http://developers.technorati.com/wiki/xhtmloutlines">

(expanding in-place, via Ajax)

…or, those remote outlines may take the place of the current outline in the browser (retaining the same behaviour/presentation)

…or, the node might refer to an file, that can be transcluded in-place via Ajax+XSLT

…or, the node might refer to data, which might be nicely displayed (a display:block in place) using format-specific CSS/XSLT

…or, the node might refer to an RSS/Atom feed, that can be transcluded in-place via XSLT

…or, the node might refer to a del.icio.us tag, or a Technorati Cosmos link, which also might be transcluded in place via the respective RESTful API and a little XSLT

…or, the node might refer to a SPARQL query, the results of which may be transcluded/formatted in place, again via XSLT/CSS

…or, the node might refer to an FOAF or DOAP profile that can be transcluded in-place (probably via SPARQL & XSLT again)

…or, citation info could be transcluded in place from a service like citeseer or Connotea

…or, the leaf node might be an audio or other media file, and an appropriate player launched

…or, the node might expand to endpoints to other services, where the effects of in-place editing will be passed to the services (e.g. POSTed to a blog or Wiki, or a GET to the Google API)

…or, an individual node can be bookmarked a la Purple

…or, an individual node can be folksonomically tagged

…or, an node/visible subtree in the expansion may be pumped into a browser-friendly tool like PiggyBank or generic triplestore/Atom Store/XML/SQL DB (local or remote) for future reference, saving the current UI state

Once that's all in place, we animate the .GIFs.

~

PS. Les Orchard has done a half-hearted implementation.

[Danny]

Danny Ayers

2005-07-14T21:18:41Z

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