Re: [JemBlog-Develop] Input Templates

[Ian D. <ia...@in...>]

On Tuesday, 18 March 2003 at 17:32, Leigh Dodds wrote:
> Interesting and a great idea. I might steal it for the FOAF-a-Matic.
That's OK, FOAF-a-Matic is going to be assimilated into JemBlog at
some point in the future - aren't all RDF apps just part of one big
collective ultimately anyway ;)

> If I could build up a editing UI, dynamically to support the data that
> would solve much of the problem. There's nothing in your example below 
> thats particularly web/blog-centric so it could have multiple uses.
Yes, that's the idea. My driver for this is keeping tabs on the books
I've read recently. Currently I have a trivial Moveable Type
installation but I have to remember to use the excerpt field to store
the ISBN - it's a hack to fit my data into the MT model. Now, if I
had an extensible UI that let me enter a title, description, author
(of book, not posting!) and ISBN then I'd be happy. Having a useful
templating language for output would be necessary as well so I can
pick the last 15 'things' with a title and description for my RSS
feed.


> However, before we jump down the RDF route, is there anything in 
> XForms or a subset that could be used? Or are there particular benefits 
> in an RDF description of the UI?
The primary benefit is in the storage of the form descriptions. If
they are RDF they can be stored in the triple store and retrieved with
a query - e.g. find me a form that lets me enter an rss:item. The form
would be extensible simply by reading in an extra bit of RDF (although
this might end up confusing the user).

Maybe there's a way to synthesize XForms and RDF. Use RDF to describe
the structure and context of a form and XForms elements to describe
the actual fields.


- Ian <ia...@in...>
"The test of all knowledge is experiment."