Backslash

[Mark Fowler]

Slashdot, and everything else running Slash (i.e. use.perl.org) seem to no
longer be doing XML RSS feeds, but a custom DTD called 'backslash'.  I 
was wondering if anyone knows anything about this.

I'm currently working on building summaries of sites, and then things
from these summaries.  I was planning to build RSS documents for each of
them using XML::RSS (following the helpful section in dmwp.)  I was
wondering:

 a) What and Why is backslash?  
 b) Is this better/worse/indifferent?  Should I use it instead?
 c) How do I parse it (XML::RSS doesn't work, am I going to have to code
it from hand?)

Dipsy seems to be able to cope with this..

Later.

Mark.

http://slashdot.org/slashdot.xml
http://slashdot.org/backslash.dtd

-- 
print "\n",map{my$a="\n"if(length$_6);' 'x(36-length($_)/2)."$_\n$a"} (
   Name  = 'Mark Fowler',Title = 'Technology Developer'  ,
   Firm  = 'Profero Ltd',Web   = 'http://www.profero.com/'   ,
   Email = '[EMAIL PROTECTED]',   Phone = '+44 (0) 20 7700 9960'  )

Re: Backslash

[Leon Brocard]

Mark Fowler sent the following bits through the ether:

 Slashdot, and everything else running Slash (i.e. use.perl.org) seem to no
 longer be doing XML RSS feeds, but a custom DTD called 'backslash'.  I 
 was wondering if anyone knows anything about this.

Don't know about the Big Picture, but you can still get RDF:

http://www.slashdot.org/slashdot.rdf
http://use.perl.org/useperl.rdf

Leon
-- 
Leon Brocard.http://www.astray.com/
yapc::Europehttp://yapc.org/Europe/

... BREAKFAST.COM Halted... Cereal Port Not Responding.

RE: Backslash

[Simon Batistoni]

Mark:
  a) What and Why is backslash?
  b) Is this better/worse/indifferent?  Should I use it instead?

I'd love to know both of these. I can't find anything regarding backslash
following a quick trawl of the slashcode site.

I'm immediately pre-disposed against it simply because, even if only the
name differs, simply because it adds to the standards (original RDF, RSS and
now this) being used for site newsfeeds, and therefore makes the job of
integrating newsfeeds a right pain in the arse.

  c) How do I parse it (XML::RSS doesn't work, am I going to have to code
 it from hand?)

 Dipsy seems to be able to cope with this..

The infobot code doesn't do a proper XML parse. It simply pulls in the file
using LWP::UserAgent, and regexes for the title, url and time tags
within the file, which happen not to have changed in the backslash format.

sb