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This site is no longer maintained.
My current weblog.
Wednesday, March 13, 2002Today on scripting.com, Dave pointed to someone planning to replace the Blogger API with something "non application-specific." Great idea! In theory anyhow. In practice there is much to be desired. Why must everything involved in a weblog-style CMS be treated as distinctly different objects? There is no compelling reason for this. It creates a "lowest common denominator" that offers simplicity at the expense of extensibility. We ought not to have to make that sacrifice.
A clean-sheet CMS API should provide a generic set of properties for describing any type of object (content) within it's data store, and a generic set of methods for accessing those objects. Properties that are not generic should be passed around within a final <struct> parameter. Applications would only have to pass the base parameters and the specific properties they are working with. The CMS would decide how to handle unspecified properties.
This is not to say that there shouldn't be additional methods for handling specific types of objects. Rather, the use of type-specific methods by a client should be optional, and the type-specific methods should continue to require a minimal set of parameters combined with a <struct> for handling additional object properties.
The end result would be an API that provides a "lowest common denominator" while allowing CMS and application vendors to provide richer functionality, without sacrificing compatibility with the spec. It's totally win-win.
Not a single post since I woke up this morning. It happens sometimes. This was a resume-sending day. Got to find a new job. Not easy for an NT sysadmin in South Florida whose work experience is heavily web-biased, nor for a budding ASP/VB developer whose major reference work cannot be demonstrated due to employer restrictions (spent over a year building an "idiot oriented" web-based CMS for my most recent employer, having neat features like approval chains, versioning and n-way replication, with neither funding nor resources). That's part of the reason I am working on things like MOB and bloggerCOM.
Anyhow. One more post, then it is bed time.
Palm's online store is now offering a Bluetooth SD card for $129. Wish that my dust-covered Palm Vx LE had an SD slot...
