Kimbro Staken's new blog software, built on top of Sleepycat's Berkeley DB XML, echoes a theme I've been working with myself for a while. A collection of well-formed weblog entries is, implicitly, an XML database whose contents can be searched and intelligently recombined. I've been toying with a simple file-based solution that creates an XPath search interface to my blog content. Kimbro's approach takes the next step:
Now the really interesting feature of this system is that it's really an XML database Web Service. I exposed an XPath query facility through the URL so that the database can be queried via HTTP GET. [Inspirational Technology]
Kimbro gives this example:
http://www.xmldatabases.org/WK/blog/item//a (all links)
But I can change it to, for example:
http://www.xmldatabases.org/WK/blog/item//table[contains(.,'Annie Lennox')] (tables containing 'Annie Lennox')
Very cool! As Kimbro points out:
The possibilities of this are endless, especially as you add more meaningful markup to your posts.I just love this idea of incorporating XPath into RESTian URLs. With Kimbro's approach, you get immediate use of the markup you create -- just the kind of incentive that's needed.
Former URL: http://weblog.infoworld.com/udell/2003/09/16.html#a797