[Clipart] Navigation in the OCAL

[Petr Vaněk]

On Sunday 04 of September 2005 00:47, Jonadab the Unsightly One wrote:
> Petr Vaněk <petr at scribus.info> writes:
> > And there is one big *BUT*. Current solution of the online OCAL
> > browsing is based on the HTML parsing.
...
> > This is very slow and bug vulnerable (webdesigner can change layout
> > and we are screwed ;)) etc.
>
> Indeed.  And the layout probably will change, if not soon then
> eventually.
>
> > I suggest to create auto-updated index file situated e.g.
> > http://openclipart.org/clipart/navigation.xml
>
> There is one, here:
> http://openclipart.org/clipart/index.xml

ok, this is new for me. It's hardly usable except of the file size - I cannot 
enforce user to download 4.5MB when he wants to use OCAL browser. Yes, I can 
use some caching methods etc. but it's very large file.
BTW how often is it updated?

> This file indexes the most important metadata (authors, keywords,
> titles, and title words) and gives the relative path to each file that
> has them.
>
> We have thought about also including a manifest.xml that would not
> index the metadata but just list every included file, but at the
> time of this writing we have not done that.
>
> If we did, which would be better for you to use, the index, or the
> manifest?  Why?

That's question ;) Actually I still think manifest should be useful. Imagine 
user waiting 3 minutes for application reconfiguring (on my wireless 
connection).

index:
+ better for the contents categorizing
- file size (idea: should be used some patches/diffs for updating?)

manifest:
- lack the keywords and metadata
+ file size. It can be downloaded through dialup too (yep, I know some people 
using dialup still;))

Other idea: directory hierarchy of the OCAL is so-called metadata too. With 
manifest it can be understandable for users too.

If you decide to create manifest too I can imagine OCAL browser with default 
index parsing for quick network connections. Manifest should be used as 
alternative way to get content selected in configuration of the client 
application.

> > with current directory structure of the OCAL server. I've created
> > some example file for my old clipart snapshot on my hdd. You can see
> > it (250kB):  http://www.yarpen.cz/ocal/navigation.xml
>
> This is similar to what a manifest would look like, if we included
> one.  It wouldn't be exactly like that, but along those lines.  It
> probably would also list the .png thumbnails and the various
> meta-files (LICENSE and so forth) somehow.  We had not worked out
> a format for it in detail yet, mainly because we just hadn't gotten
> around to it.

Sure. I can imagine that will be included only basename of the file. E.g.:
mycoolimage.svg
mycoolimage.png
mycoolimage.info
=>
<item somemetadata="" as="" attributes="">mycoolname</item>

Then I know that I should append some extension. Anyway it depends on the 
chosen implementation.

all the best
p.

-- 
Petr Vanek 
www.scribus.info - petr at scribus.info
www.yarpen.cz    - petr at yarpen.cz

Kuolema Kaikille (Paitsi Meille)
Today is good day to end it all
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