xoxo-brainstorming

XOXO brainstorming

Authors

• Tantek Çelik
• DimitriGlazkov

Example Uses

XOXO Lists and outlines are used for numerous special purposes across the web. This section is here to document both best practices and recommendations.

Blogrolls

Background: See L.M. Orchard's post "Subscriptions Are Attention But What About Blogrolls".

Nearly all blogrolls are already published as XOXO on blog, but there is no obvious way to distinguish the XOXO blogroll from other lists in the content/header/footer of the blog.

XOXO standardizes (see xoxo-profile) the class name "blogroll" for blogroll lists. E.g.

<ul class="xoxo blogroll">
 <li><a href="...">...</a></li>
 <li><a href="...">...</a></li>
</ul>

Note that a blogroll is a superset of a subscription list.

Subscription information

Some blogrolls contain feed information -- it would be nice if XOXO blogrolls could capture this information also. This, in and of itself, would be a nice step up from OPML.

• An example of OPML to a unordered list w/ expand/collapse folders

Possible XOXO blogs+feeds markup

Here is one example of how you could publish blogs+feeds in XOXO. Note that since a XOXO parser will only treat the first hyperlink as the info for the list item, the blog names and URLs will be parsed, and the feeds will be ignored. In reality, the blogs themselves should contain the necessary auto-discovery links to their own feeds, which is more reliable anyway.

<ul class="xoxo blogroll">
 <li>
  <a href="blogURL1">Blog Name 1</a>
  <a href=".../index.xml" rel="alternate" type="application/atom+xml">RSS</a>
 </li>
 <li>
  <a href="blogURL2">Blog Name 2</a>
  <a href=".../index.xml" rel="alternate" type="application/rss+xml">RSS</</a>
  <a href=".../index.atom" rel="alternate" type="application/atom+xml">Atom</a>
 </li>
</ul>

CSS styling could make this as pretty or not as desired.

See also blog-info-examples, blog-info-formats, blog-info-brainstorming, XOXO Blogroll Format

Wishlists

Background: See L.M. Orchard's post: "I wish it were in XOXO"

Similar to blogrolls, what if we used the class name "wishlist"?

What are the distinguishing features of wishlists?

Is a wishlist item the same as a listing that is looking for an item? See: listing-examples, listing-formats, listing-brainstorming

Tagged Links

This one seems easier, because you could simply use a list of xFolk items, which is recognizable.

Alternatively we could also use the class name "linkroll".

But how far can we successfully take that method (of adding a new class name for each specific use of XOXO) scale and continue working?

Applying "compact", Presentation Caveats

Currently, setting DOM property compact to true in Gecko produces an empty-value compact="" attribute, rather than the valid compact="compact". In order to account for this quirk/bug, the CSS2 selector should be:

ol[compact] { display: none; }

If the XOXO item (represented by li element) contains properties, the application of compact may require more work to provide desired presentation. Since compact applies to the list, not the item, the properties of the item remain unaffected by changing the value of the attribute on the list (which is a peer of the property bag, represented by dl element). For example, consider this XOXO fragment:

<ul>
	<li>select
		<dl>
			<dt>show-title</dt>
			<dd>false</dd>
		</dl>
		<ol compact>
			<li>title</li>
			<li>abstract</li>
		</ol>
	</li>
</ul>

If the desired presentation effect is to only show select when the nested list is collapsed, additional information (like a class name, assigned to li element) is necessary to hide dl element. In CSS3, there is a way to somewhat address it using general sibling selectors:

ol[compact],
ol[compact] ~ dl { 
   display: none;
}

Parsing Properties

• From HTML spec, the content of both dl, and li can contain block or inline elements.
  • this implies that special properties can include markup.
  • naturally, url, type, and rel properties don't fit into this rule logically, but that's a reasonable exception.
• First a element specifies text, url, title, type and rel properties
  • If these properties are also defined using dl, they:
    • a. override values, specified in hyperlink
    • b. are ignored -- I (DimitriGlazkov) am leaning toward this choice
• First dl is treated as a special property set
  • how to escape in case dl is content, not property set?
    • possibly like this:

<ul class="xoxo">
	<li>
		<dl>
			<dt>text</dt>
			<dd>
				<!-- escaped -->
				<dl class="dictionary">
					<dt>term</dt>
					<dd>definition</dd>
				</dl>
			</dd>
		</dl>
	</li>
</ul>

Based on preliminary research, all parsers mentioned in xoxo-sample-code use property bag or dictionary to collect properties, which means that last value specified wins (overrides previously specified). This means that this bit of markup:

<ul class="xoxo">
	<li>
		<a href="http://microformats.org">Microformats</a>
		<dl>
			<dt>text</dt>
			<dd>XOXO</dd>
		</dl>
	</li>
</ul>

Will parse the value of text property as XOXO, not Microformats. Not sure yet whether this this the right thing.

Representing data structures in HTML

A mapping could be made between XOXO and the standard data structures of most programming languages - JSON, YAML, XML-RPC etc. --TomMorris 10:02, 10 Aug 2007 (PDT)

OPML/XOXO conversion

This has been moved to xoxo-opml-issues. –TomMorris 18:44, 3 December 2009 (UTC)