Andrew Shearer's Drivel

HTMLFilter 1.1 released

Sun, 28 Sep 2003 15:52:13 -0400

HTMLFilter, in its first public standalone release, is a module for Python programs. It parses an HTML 4 document, allowing subclasses to pass through or modify the the text and tags as they go by. The resulting copy will be an otherwise exact replica of the original, including whitespace and comments. ASP, PHP, JSP, or other server-side code will generally survive the round trip. (The only exception is if the code is embedded inside an HTML tag you’re actually modifying, not just passing through, and in most cases any tag attributes not explicitly modified are safe.)

The use can be as simple as adding a <meta> tag to an existing web page without disturbing the rest, or as complex as merging two HTML pages (as it’s used in ShearerSite, which intelligently merges content pages into template pages).

You can also use it to generate HTML from scratch, with HTMLFilter taking care of the attribute encoding for tags.

HTMLFilter. Python-licensed. Unicode and encoding-savvy. Tested with Python 1.5.2 through 2.3.

Mac Justification

Sun, 28 Sep 2003 15:39:31 -0400

Macintouch has some good discussion on justifying Mac purchases.

Listamatic

Sun, 28 Sep 2003 15:38:31 -0400

CSS techniques for great-looking HTML lists, demonstrated.

John Cleese on Technology

Sun, 28 Sep 2003 15:37:54 -0400

Some good quotes here from a recent speech.

XMLFilter

Mon, 15 Sep 2003 20:47:26 -0400

I just released version 1.1 of XMLFilter, which marks the first public standalone release. XMLFilter is an open-source Python module you can include with your programs to provide XML parsing even if the target system lacks a working xml.sax package. You can use it to quickly adapt existing xml.sax-compatible scripts to work out of the box, for example, on Jaguar (Mac OS X 10.2), which lacks expat.

It works by using the older xmllib module as a fallback for xml.sax. A test suite verifies call-by-call compatibility no matter which module ends up being used.

Other features include XML event-stream filtering, writing, and creation, with support for writing CDATA sections. (Using these classes also avoids bugs in some versions of xml.sax.)

Generally, the newer your version of Python, the faster it goes. For example, if xml.sax and expat are working, they give a factor-of-3 speedup over the pure-Python xmllib, and on Python 2.3, Unicode encoding conversions will use xmlcharrefreplace for faster writing of XML numeric entities.

Python-licensed. Tested all the way down to Python 1.5.2 and up to Python 2.3. xml.sax-compatible, Unicode-savvy (wherever Python is), and optionally namespace-aware.

Providence and Mystic Kayaking

Tue, 09 Sep 2003 08:14:32 -0400

My Mystic, CT trip (with RICKA) and Providence, RI trip (later that day, on my own), in pictures.

Universal's CD price cut comedy gets five stars

Sat, 06 Sep 2003 21:01:44 -0400

The Register rains on Universal’s parade.

Moving to a Mac

Sat, 06 Sep 2003 17:58:32 -0400

A small integration project dispels some preconceptions about OS X [InfoWorld: Application Development]

Clay Shirky: Fame vs Fortune: Micropayments...

Sat, 06 Sep 2003 01:33:10 -0400

Clay Shirky: Fame vs Fortune: Micropayments and Free Content. The answer is simple: creators are not publishers, and putting the power to publish directly into their hands does not make them publishers. It makes them artists with printing presses. This matters because creative people crave attention in a way publishers do not. [Tomalak's Realm]