Announce: Metacentric news and metadata service

I would like to announce the launch of the Metacentric news feed and 
metadata service at:

http://www.metacentric.net/

The Metacentric site is designed to be as clear and simple as 
possible to use, with jargon kept to an absolute minimum. The site 
includes FAQs and illustrations others might find useful to explain 
news feeds and metadata to a general audience. The notes below are 
intended for specialist interest on this list.

Metacentric provides a scraper service that transforms standard HTML 
into RSS 1.0 using XSL transformation. It also processes any Dublin 
Core metadata in the source according to the DC in HTML 
recommendation [1]. HTML input is passed through JTidy [2] to convert 
to XHTML, and is validated against a "lax" DTD, so the system 
tolerates a range of non-standard markup.

The two main processing modes select links or fragment anchors in the 
document to form news items, so the service does not require any 
special template-style markup. The anchor content is used for the 
item title and adjacent block level content for the description.

All processing is conducted remotely, so requires no scripts, 
databases or special software on source Web sites. The number of feed 
items can be controlled with a "limit" parameter on the service URL.

The system caches the transformation result according to any HTTP 
expires header for the source HTML, or for one day if none is 
present. Customers can force a refresh for urgent changes through the 
Metacentric Web site, create copy-and-paste markup for link buttons 
and auto-discovery links.

The Metacentric service also includes a Javascript include feed, for 
easy syndication with other Web sites, and a pure RDF metadata feed. 

Thanks to those on the RSS-DEV and RSS Validator lists who helped 
with technical issues over the past few years, especially Chris 
Croome.

Best regards,

Phil


[1] http://dublincore.org/documents/2003/11/30/dcq-html/
[2] http://jtidy.sourceforge.net/
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<URL:http://www.codestyle.org/>    Web font statistics and developer FAQs
<URL:http://www.metacentric.net/>  Automated news feeds for your Web site


 
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