Re: Improving gweather

[Mark McLoughlin <mark skynet ie>]

Hey,
	Its great to see this coming up in discussion. This issue proved to be
a stopper for Sun shipping gweather and I think the plan was that one of
us would get around to fixing it "soon".

On Sat, 2003-03-08 at 06:01, Owen Taylor wrote:
> On Fri, 2003-03-07 at 11:36, Jeff Waugh wrote:
> > <quote who="Havoc Pennington">
> > 
> > > I'd tend to suggest that we point the applet at an URL we control (say
> > > weather.gnome.org) and have it expect the XML format.
> > 
> > > In any case if we have the applet looking at an URL/format we control we
> > > can always fix it.
> > 
> > It also means that we (and when I say "we" I mean "GNOME's kind web hosting
> > sponsor, Red Hat") have to fork out the bandwidth fees... Might be an
> > interesting way to find out how many users we have, though. ;-)
> 
> I suspect that an extra level of indirection:
> 
>  The weather applet connects to the server and asks for an URL 
>  to connect to when started. 
> 
>  All future attempts go to the redirected URL for some period
>  of time (or until failure)

	Of course, its not just the hard coding of a URL thats a problem.
Previously, AFAIR, gweather parsed an arbitrarily formatted HTML page
and now it parses XML. A change in this format will break the applet
just as much as the URL changing ... I think there's a few options for
fixing that:

	* Mirror the service on gnome.org in our own "standard" format.

	or

	* Allow the applet to pull from gnome.org both the location of the
service and enough information to parse the output. Maybe a list of
XPath paths into the output for each piece of data we use might work,
maybe we could supply an XSL transform to apply to the ouput and parse
the result, maybe ... I'll leave that discussion up to people who know
what they're talking about.

Good Luck,
Mark.