Re: Announce: nnwarchive

[Lars Magne Ingebrigtsen <larsi@gnus.org>]

Eric Marsden <emarsden@mail.dotcom.fr> writes:

> They all operate basically the same way: download the page, extract
> the information, return it formatted. They face the same challenges:
> conveniently and securely providing updates to users relatively often,
> as web sites undergo facelifts.

The layout parsing is one thing, but w3 can deal with that better than 
the current regexp-based things in nnweb, I think.

> So I am wondering if there is scope for a generic "wash.el" which
> would take as an argument an URL (which is dynamically generated in
> certain cases), a parser function which returns matches, operating on
> the raw HTML, and provides automatic or semi-automatic update services
> which connect to some trusted web site where washing-authors can put
> updates.

It's an interesting idea.  It doesn't even have to be code on the
trusted web site -- it could just be something that would say how the
w3 parse tree should be interpreted.  Like -- "this node in the tree
is the author name, and this node is the body of the message".

It sounds like an interesting project.  "How to extract information
from HTML pages."  But it'll be difficult.

-- 
(domestic pets only, the antidote for overdose, milk.)
   larsi@gnus.org * Lars Magne Ingebrigtsen