Re: [xml-dev] MarkMail: now archiving xml-dev

[Elliotte Harold <elharo@metalab.unc.edu>]

Jason Hunter wrote:

> As you'll see with the chart on the home page, one of our goals with the 
> site has been to focus heavily on analytics.  We have lots of graphs and 
> counts.  Every query you write gets its own histogram chart.
> 

Yes, but it seems to be only the queries you've planned for. What I find 
lacking in this sort of approach is two-fold:

1. The URLs aren't exposed so you can't easily mash things up. It has 
the classic problem of framed pages, only more so because it's all done 
with AJAX.

2. The database is not exposed to real XQuery. You can get a lot more 
out of that database from behind the firewall than we can from in front 
of it.

What's presented is a mildly interesting way to ego-surf and kill time, 
and perhaps marginally better than doing full text search with Google, 
but it doesn't really change the game. There may be a lot of power in 
storing mailing list archives in a native XML database, but that's lost 
when the database is locked behind a limited, non-XQuery web interface.

Now if one were to define a way to embed arbitrary XQuery expressions 
inside a URL and serve those results, then that would be interesting.

-- 
Elliotte Rusty Harold  elharo@metalab.unc.edu
Java I/O 2nd Edition Just Published!
http://www.cafeaulait.org/books/javaio2/
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