I had a little time to kill, was looking for a diversion, so I sent a
message to Netscape's server via script and I was blown away. It's XML! Yes
it is. And why, oh why, didn't they tell anyone? (Or did I miss something?)
Anyway, I wrote an app that talks to their server. It interfaces thru an
HTML form, you enter the URL of a site, and I'll find out what's related,
with a twist. The URL to the related site links back to the form, and I do
a lookup on *that* site, allowing you to interactively walk their tree of
relationships between sites.
This is just a demonstration. I'm not trying to put an extra load on
Netscape's server, I just want to be sure that people interested in
building XML apps have a way to experience the XMLness of what Netscape has
done, which is very interesting, for sure.
Here's the link to my app:
http://nirvana.userland.com/whatsRelated/
Hope you like it!
Dave Winer
UserLand Software
PS: I'm caching the results on my server, so the second time a request is
made for a specific site, I don't have to call Netscape. It just occurred
to me that if their idea catches on, this caching service would be valuable
to corporate web users. Interesting! Could this be synergy?
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http://www.userland.com/directory.html