Re: Announce: nnwarchive

[Eric Marsden <emarsden@mail.dotcom.fr>]

There are now a number of packages which do washing of HTML pages:
nnweb.el, nnslashdot.el, nnwarchive.el, and my babel.el and watson.el
(which wash various search engines and translation services; see
X-URL), I'm probably forgetting some.

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.

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.

-- 
Eric Marsden
It's elephants all the way down