Stepping in as the below-mentioned thesis advisor, I agree with you completely about the pluggable input stage. One of the themes behind exhibit is that we should not be teaching users anything, but just making it easier for them to do what _they_ want to do.
As for your concern about easier scraping, note that if exhibit has code to parse format X then clearly we can scrape format X too. So, no worries on that score. About the only concern about handling multiple formats is whether they can all be parsed as fast as json---obviously, it's bad if exhibit takes too long to load. Plus, the little issue of writing all the parsers---as david says, we're delighted to be helped with that. -David Karger Johan Sundström wrote: > On 12/17/06, David Huynh <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > >> Hi Johan, >> >> I think support for JSONP is a great idea! And I'm glad you understood >> the intention behind Exhibit.loadDataFromTable. Which helps illustrate >> that although I have ideas of where Exhibit is going, I really have no >> time to implement those ideas. So any help with coding and designing the >> infrastructure is greatly appreciated. :-) >> > > I thought as much. :-) I also think that loadDataFromTable might > further lower barriers to entry for a vast number of present day web > users, who do not have their own web hosting, and whose online > presence is provided by systems such as Blogger, LiveJournal and > WordPress, where they are not able to upload separate JSON encoded > files to link to, but where they may be able to link the Exhibit API > and enter their own HTML markup. > > >> My thesis advisor has been pushing me to support many input formats. If >> he had his way, Exhibit would be reading Bibtex files and Excel >> spreadsheets directly! (Parsing Excel files in Javascript?!) So if you >> give me a patch of importers, you're helping me graduate earlier, haha :-) >> > > Ever more reason for making the input stage pluggable. (I figured the > lack of mentioning that was a candid design decision for trying to > focus on teaching users *one* way of conducting business, allowing for > easier scraping of only a single format, but I suppose time was the > issue here. :-) > > >> We can carry out discussion about the nitty gritty technical details of >> this importer architecture off the list. >> > > Sure. > > _______________________________________________ General mailing list [email protected] http://simile.mit.edu/mailman/listinfo/general
