Structured Blogging & OPML

I had a look at the formats Structured Blogging defined and made an attempt to translate it to OPML. Here are the results of their review example page.

A piece of OPML:

<outline text="Doin' Something" category="Review-CD" >
   <outline text="
      <a href="http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/B000059QYA?v=glance">
      <img alt="Product Image: Doin' Something" border="0" 
         src="http://images.amazon.com/images/P/B000059QYA.01._SCMZZZZZZZ_.jpg"/></a>" 
      category="Review-image" />
   <outline 
      text="<a href="http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/B000059QYA?v=glance">Doin&#8217; Something</a>" 
      category="Review-product" />
   <outline text="My rating: 4 out of 5" category="Rating" >
      <outline text="" category="Fullstar" />
      <outline text="" category="Fullstar" />
      <outline text="" category="Fullstar" />
      <outline text="" category="Fullstar" />
      <outline text="" category="Emptystar" />
      <outline text="" category="Endstars" />
   <outline>
   <outline 
      text="<p>Soulive is one of the great jam bands. They're almost impossible to 
capture well on CD, but this disc comes the closest.  I don&#8217;t really know 
what to call it: acid jazz, or just jazz, or trip-jazz, or something.  It&#8217;s basically 
just a really good flow.  </p>
<p>And there&#8217;s no singing (except for some guest vocals on a couple of
tracks).  Not necessarily good or bad, just different.  I probably would have given this disc 5 / 5, 
but part of the reason for the post is showing off the &#8220;stars&#8221;, and I wanted to demonstrate an empty one too.</p>" category="Description" />
<outline>

I took the HTML-page and added all HTML relevant to the page or Wordpress out of it. That left me with the pure MicroContent items. I kept only the tags with a class attribute starting with x-wpsb. The content of each div has been translated to an outline-tag.

Some observations

• I like that they differentiate between an entry and a sbentry. The sbentry is everyting pertaining to a MicroContent item;
• Why a different outer tag for each type of product? Why not just a single review tag for the outer tag. And an additional child-tag to define the producttype (Book, DVD, CD, Coffeemachine, etc.). The only reason I can think of is if you want to layout different for different product type. Good reason, but it is not so clean now;
• Where is the title? I miss the title of the book, CD, DVD, etc as part of a SBentry. In put the title now with the parent of a review, but there should be a separate tag;
• I had a bit of a problem with the title in cyrillic. I am not sure I did that right;
• What is the approach when in a single review multiple items are reviewed? Can I ass multiple images and multiple links?
• The rating is a bit funny. There is a text-version, i.e. My rating is for out of 5. And there are 6 div’s contained in the rating, either fullstars or emptystars and a closing endstar. I am not sure that this is the most elegant way to solving this. But I have no alternative at the moment.
• Nice thing is that every layout issue is deferred to the CSS stylesheet;

Next step is having a look at the XSD and the other Microcontent type: events.

Categories/tags: review
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