INFO 202 Fall 08 Blog

I have recently developed a ruby wrapper for the API of one of the largest internet portals in Korea. Most of their RESTful API were well organized in a form of RSS or XML, but there was one very interestingly bad case.

http://dev.naver.com/openapi/sample/rank.xml

If you open the link above (please ignore Korean part of it), you will see an XML file. The file describes the real-time hot keywords searched by people, and items are ordered by its rank. When you see the tags embracing each keyword, the names of elements are “R1″, “R2″, “R3″ and so on. In the perspective of a 202er, it should be corrected to something like that below.

<result>
<items>
<item>
<rank>1</rank>
<keyword>ischool</keyword>
<change>+32</change>
</item>
…..
</items>
</result>

Or, at least, they should use attribute to describe the rank instead using element name for doing so.

Here is an extensible example of XML. 

(Google mapping spec now an industry standard)

Keyhole Markup Language(KML) is an XML-based language schema for expressing geographic annotation and visualization on existing or future Web-based, two-dimensional maps and three-dimensional Earth browsers. KML was developed for use with Google Earth, which was originally named Keyhole Earth Viewer. It was created by Keyhole, Inc, which was acquired by Google in 2004. 

Members of an industry group called the Open Geospatial Consortium have approved Google’s KML technology as an open standard for describing some geographic data. Google now hopes that its status as an official standard will decrease barriers to further adoption.

“What OGC brings to the table is…everyone has confidence we won’t take advantage of the format or change it in a way that will harm anyone,” said Michael Weiss-Malik, Google’s KML product manager. “The goal is to prevent market fragmentation,” in which different technology uses different standards.

Furthermore, as we learned from the article ‘XML Foundation’, by using KML, the contents and information can be reused in many different ways. We can expect to see a new era blossom of personal map publishing. 

(Unfortunately, many internet-service companies in Korea still close their services to other players and have their own data format, so that keep their status quo. Even some of them do not have intention to apply the basic concept of XML to the website, not separating content and presentation. I think, this defensive and passive attitude will cause IT companies to remain more isolated.)