Bleb-to-XMLTV initiatives

[Adrian Hindle-Briscall <Adrian@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Hi all

I have some questions about the end purpose of the work that is currently
going on.

The background AIUI is that Andrew has an app which gets the data from
various public sources and generates XML according to his own schema.
There is another schema XMLTV which has some international currency and for
which some apps are available.  Ananova used to provide listings in XMLTV
but have just stopped.

Various people are getting on with converting bleb-XML to XMLTV to support
those users who used Ananova.  As far as I can see, both seem to contain
the same data in an equally accessible form.  There's no huge reason to
prefer one format over another except for popularity and available software
- but that's a big reason.

My questions are:
Is the eventual plan for Andrew to have the use of one of the conversions
so that he could host listings in XMLTV instead of or as well as the bleb
XML?  If so maybe Andrew could make available 'interface details' of some
sort that would allow a more direct conversion from his internal data.
(That I realize is highly dependent on platform and type of application.)

If not, does anyone have plans to host the XMLTV format data?  Or will it
be up to individual users to do their own conversion using whichever tools
may be made available, or their own?

This obviously raises questions of the ownership of the data.  We should
recognize that parsing the various source URLs is by far the major task and
it's for him to decide how it's used.  Currently he makes it available for
free download but if people used it in a way he didn't like he has the
final sanction of pulling the plug for all of us.  And converting from one
XML schema to another isn't of the same order of complexity as grabbing the
source data.  So the question is addressed to all, but Andrew has the
deciding say in it.

That all reads a bit pompously, but even if the coding is useful to the
writer and/or fun for its own sake, why not let's think of how it can be
put to common use.

Adrian