[Slashcode-development] Q: Can Slash discussions be served in a format other than HTML?

[Nick M. <mat...@ai...>]

Greetings,

My name is Nick Matsakis, and I'm a graduate student at MIT's AI
Laboratory. Lately, I've been working on some problems in information
retrieval, and have become very interested in Slash-based sites as a
potential source of data to try out some techniques.

I've know that Slashdot (and others) serve lists of headlines in XML, and
these are (presumably) the basis of many of the headline viewing programs
out there.  However, what I am interested in is the threaded comment
discussions that each new article spawns. I've looked around a bit, and
have not been able to find out whether or not Slash is able to provide
third parties direct access to these discussions, rather than as HTML.  

Ideally, what I would want would be an XML-like document which lists each
comment with a unique identifier, the identifier of the comment it is a
response to, and the text of the comment.  Other metadata (author, rating,
subject) is useful but not necessary.  

I realize that this question is off-topic for a developers list, but it
seemed like the most direct way to get an answer to the yes or no question
of "is this possible?"

Regards,

Nick Matsakis