I am new to Sherlock Channels and was impressed with the possibility
but unimpressed with its current state of implementation. There was a
recent blog on doing HTML extraction in Java:
Anyway, I just shipped similar technology for the Mac in my <alt>
Mobile Internet Studio v4. It is similar to the channel approach in
that:
1. Extracts HTML
2. Uses XML technology
My product is different because:
1. It is integrated with a browser so you just visually select the HTML
element from the browser. The tool will do the code generation
including generating your target XHTML/WML as an XSL.
2. It uses XSL rather than XQuery
3. It will do realtime translation of the source HTML elements into the
target XHTML or WML including all the required namespaces etc. (It can
also do SQL and Web Services)
4. It is multi-platform as XSL engines are everywhere and I have never
seen a commercial XQuery engine (other than embedded in MS SQL Server
and BEA Liquid Data)
Here's a screen shot enabling you to find 802.11 WiFI locations in San
Jose transcoded direclty from the 80211hotspots.com website:
So what that said, does anyone know the plans for this channel?
Possible Safari integration? How to access the XQuery engine? Is this
AppleScriptable? From what I've seen, this is a work in progress and
does not support AppleScript, is not integrated into Safari, the HTML
parsing is not externalized to 3rd party products, and the XQuery
engine is of unknown origin.
Feel free to email privately if needed.
It is interesting in that there are 3 divergent trends in multi-source
query technology. Last year BEA introduced Liquid Data which is a
server technology to extract data from multiple sources. It uses XQuery
as primary developer language. The next is IBM's Xperanto which uses
new extensions to SQL to query multiple data sources from Java.
Xperanto is a server technology and was announced last month. The 3rd
is an XSL approach which my company is promoting.
So if anyone actively uses this technology, I would welcome your
comments about the following:
1. How hard was it to learn XQuery?
2. Is there any interest integrating this into Safari/Mozilla/IE for
visual extraction --even though we do it now in our tool, does using a
more well-know browser make this more appealing?
3. Is there any desire for a cross platform solution
4. Is there any preference to using channels versus standalone tools
