xml-dev - Netscape is running an XML app!

[Dave Winer <dave@userland.com>]

Yesterday I got an email from Jeff Veen at Wired pointing me to the server
that Netscape is running its What's Related? application on. This is the
project they did with Alexa, and it's the back-end for the What's Related?
feature in Netscape 4.5. 

I had a little time to kill, was looking for a diversion, so I sent a
message to Netscape's server via script and I was blown away. It's XML! Yes
it is. And why, oh why, didn't they tell anyone? (Or did I miss something?)

Anyway, I wrote an app that talks to their server. It interfaces thru an
HTML form, you enter the URL of a site, and I'll find out what's related,
with a twist. The URL to the related site links back to the form, and I do
a lookup on *that* site, allowing you to interactively walk their tree of
relationships between sites.

This is just a demonstration. I'm not trying to put an extra load on
Netscape's server, I just want to be sure that people interested in
building XML apps have a way to experience the XMLness of what Netscape has
done, which is very interesting, for sure.

Here's the link to my app:

http://nirvana.userland.com/whatsRelated/

Hope you like it!

Dave Winer
UserLand Software

PS: I'm caching the results on my server, so the second time a request is
made for a specific site, I don't have to call Netscape. It just occurred
to me that if their idea catches on, this caching service would be valuable
to corporate web users. Interesting! Could this be synergy?

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http://www.userland.com/directory.html


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