Hi Mark,

On Aug 31, 2006, at 9:17 PM, Mark Rickerby wrote:
Not sure if this is off topic, but I was wondering whether it might be
useful to flip this around and look at things from the opposite
perspective of treating xhtml pages as remote data sources.
...
Thoughts? Anyone keen to dive in and get this working? I haven't
looked at the source code for ActiveResource yet, but I'm sure it's
possible to figure out a much better design for doing pretty much what
I just described.

I agree that this is very interesting, and that ActiveResource would be a good starting point:

http://ryandaigle.com/articles/2006/06/30/whats-new-in-edge-rails- activeresource-is-here http://blog.justbe.com/articles/2006/07/21/refactoring-a-rails-app-to- be-restful http://blog.mauricecodik.com/2006/06/instant-rest-on-rails- activeresource.html

The key limitation from our perspective is that ActiveResource expects a properly formatted XML document. If I understand you correctly, you want a variant (ActiveMicroformat?) that instead asked for "xhtml" documents, which were formatted according to the appropriate microformats, perhaps using:

http://microformats.org/wiki/rest/description [moribund]
http://microformats.org/wiki/rest/datatypes#Summary

I guess the key question for me is:

a) how much structure you need in the published XHTML to succesfuly reconstruct the record

b) how best to embed that structure in the outgoing XHTML

I realize we could probably do all this in "straight" HTML, but I think it might be useful to start from the "opposite" direction and move from rigid XML to semi-rigid, user-readable XHTML first, and then later see if we can make it flexible enough for "designed" HTML.

If you want to dive in, I'm happy to act as your diving buddy. ;-)

-- Ernie P.


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