ActiveResource Re: [uf-rest] Ruby/Rails helper for Microformats?

[Dr. Ernie Prabhakar]

Hi Mark,

On Aug 31, 2006, at 9:17 PM, Mark Rickerby wrote:
> Not sure if this is off topic, but I was wondering whether it might be
> useful to flip this around and look at things from the opposite
> perspective of treating xhtml pages as remote data sources.
> ...
> Thoughts? Anyone keen to dive in and get this working? I haven't
> looked at the source code for ActiveResource yet, but I'm sure it's
> possible to figure out a much better design for doing pretty much what
> I just described.

I agree that this is very interesting, and that ActiveResource would  
be a good starting point:

http://ryandaigle.com/articles/2006/06/30/whats-new-in-edge-rails- 
activeresource-is-here
http://blog.justbe.com/articles/2006/07/21/refactoring-a-rails-app-to- 
be-restful
http://blog.mauricecodik.com/2006/06/instant-rest-on-rails- 
activeresource.html

The key limitation from our perspective is that ActiveResource  
expects a properly formatted XML document.  If I understand you  
correctly, you want a variant (ActiveMicroformat?) that instead asked  
for "xhtml" documents, which were formatted according to the  
appropriate microformats, perhaps using:

http://microformats.org/wiki/rest/description [moribund]
http://microformats.org/wiki/rest/datatypes#Summary

I guess the key question for me is:

a) how much structure you need in the published XHTML to succesfuly  
reconstruct the record

b) how best to embed that structure in the outgoing XHTML

I realize we could probably do all this in "straight" HTML, but I  
think it might be useful to start from the "opposite" direction and  
move from rigid XML to semi-rigid, user-readable XHTML first, and  
then later see if we can make it flexible enough for "designed" HTML.

If you want to dive in, I'm happy to act as your diving buddy. ;-)

-- Ernie P.