Truer Words - A Journal

Greg's Conversant-Ruby Scripts

seth@macrobyte.net — Fri, 14 Apr 2006 21:25:20 GMT

Greg has produced a set of Ruby scripts for editing your Conversant site's templates, javascripts, and stylesheets *locally*. It downloads them all via xml-rpc. You edit them in your local editor, then run the upload script and it sends back whatever has been modified.

Very handy when you're doing a lot of work on a site... such as when you're trying to perfect your design for your next entry in the patterns contest!

Weblog II is Finally "Out There"

seth@macrobyte.net — Thu, 01 Dec 2005 17:19:31 GMT

After years of private beta (man that's embarrassing to admit out loud), Macrobyte has finally released Weblog II, our 'next generation' weblogging system for Conversant.

Big, smart, easy to use.. and that just describes the lead developer behind it! Weblog II is even better than that!

(No, seriously, Weblog II is fully buzzword compliant. There's even a super-simple wizard for converting your old Conversant weblog to a Weblog II page.)

Greg said, "It's about time!" I agree. It's been like having a lazy, 30 year old kid still living at home with his parents. "Get out there and earn your keep, lazy bones!"

Phil Responds (sorta) re: HTML Comments and Linking Technologies

seth@macrobyte.net — Fri, 18 Mar 2005 15:18:01 GMT

I thought Phil was ignoring me. I wrote to him on the 7th, after posting about HTML comments and embedded RDF, to ask what he thought of my suggesting regarding invisible links pointing to autodiscovery documents.

He wasn't ignoring me, he just couldn't put his brain into gear for this one. (I'm not picking on him, that's what he said!).

He asked people to comment on my idea. Unfortunately, most of the comments have nothing to do with the problem at hand, and many of the commentors apparently don't understand the issue. (They talk about everything from the usefulness of trackback to the second coming of <blink>.

For the record, and perhaps to help bring the discussion back to the real point, here's the bulk of the email I sent to him:

[SNIP]

<http://www.truerwords.net/4599>

At the end of that post, I had an idea/suggestion for linking to autodiscovery (or other types of metadata) documents that would seem to work with pages having multiple items (which has always been one of the two big problems with using a <link> elements in the head).

I realize it's not perfect, as the <a> tag doesn't actually have any identifying information that would allow the machine to associate it with a post on a page containing more than one (such as a weblog's home page). So, what about something like this?

<a rel="trackback:http://philringnalda.com/blog/2002/08/trackback_and_validation_summary.php" href="http://philringnalda.com/mt/mt-tb.cgi/55?_type=discover"></a>

The single value in the rel attribute manages to both identify it as a trackback-related url, and identify the server object it supports. It appears to be a legal value, as the spec only says that the value of rel must be a string with the space separating multiple values (but we're only providing one long value).

It's logical, too, making it very easy to automate.

Any thoughts on this? I'm interested not just for the sake of trackback, but because other technologies will have a chance to "bloom" if this hurdle can be overcome.

He didn't publish that email, which is good, but without it the people being asked to comment would really have very little on which to comment.

Hopefully he'll post a follow-up with a link to this entry, so some more relevant discussion can take place.

Creative Commons, Trackback, HTML Comments, and Embedded RDF

seth@macrobyte.net — Mon, 07 Mar 2005 23:57:15 GMT

How many years do I have to work with HTML before I stop discovering important technical points of which I should have been aware all along?

Today's rather embarrassing example regards the format of HTML comments. This completely took me by surprise.

HTML comments have the following syntax:
    
    
White space is not permitted between the markup declaration open delimiter("<!") and the comment open delimiter ("--"), but is permitted between the comment close delimiter ("--") and the markup declaration close delimiter (">"). A common error is to include a string of hyphens ("---") within a comment. Authors should avoid putting two or more adjacent hyphens inside comments.

Information that appears between comments has no special meaning (e.g., character references are not interpreted as such).

Note that comments are markup.

In other words, comments don't end with "-->". They end with "--" followed eventually by an occurence of '>'.

This explains problems I've seen for years but never bothered to dig into deeply enough. I thought that the HTML comment delimiters were simply a "balanced pair", similar to the < and > that mark the start and end of a tag. A "".

Practical implications? There are a few. The most obvious (in my world) is that one can't reliably "comment out" the results of some Conversant macros. For example, if the macro returns a user-defined string from a database (such as a message subject), that string might include a "--". If it does, then the very next '>' will close the comment.

Trackback "autodiscovery" data is RDF embedded in HTML comments. It looks something like this:

<!--
<rdf:RDF xmlns:rdf="http://www.w3.org/1999/02/22-rdf-syntax-ns#"
    xmlns:dc="http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/"
    xmlns:trackback="http://madskills.com/public/xml/rss/module/trackback/">
<rdf:Description
    rdf:about="http://www.example.com/example/page.html"
    dc:identifier="http://www.example.com/example/page.html"
    dc:title="HTML Comments -- They Don't Work How You Thunk"
    trackback:ping="http://www.example.com/4594/trackback" />
</rdf:RDF>
-->

See the problem? The dc:title attribute of the Description element contains a "--", and so the comment is closed by the very next '>'. That leaves the </rdf:RDF> and the --> outside of the comment, and in fact Firefox displays the --> on the web page!

Creative Commons Licenses work in a similar way: they embed licensing information in the HTML via comments. They're not bitten by this comment syntax problem, though, because they have more control over the attribute values of the tags, and can intentionally avoid the double-hyphen problem.

See Kendall Grant Clark's Creative Comments: On the Uses and Abuses of Markup for a discussion of the semantic problems with this approach, and Phil Ringnalda's throrough review of the trackback problem (years old).

I didn't see any mention, in my brief research, of using a technorati-style link to solve the problem. Instead of embedding the RDF in the html, we could link to an RDF autodiscovery file with an invisible-to-people link like <a href="http://www.example.com/mt-trackback.cgi?type=autodiscover&id=4594" rel="autodiscovery"></a>. Any reason that wouldn't work?

Comments appreciated.

Clark Explains How It All Works (At Least, His Web Sites)

seth@macrobyte.net — Sat, 16 Oct 2004 22:18:15 GMT

Clark Venable is the proud papa of (at least) two web sites, and he seems to have found the magic combination of tools to make them grow. This evening, he posted a story about the tools he's using to manage them both, and how he knows the authors of the tools and the artist behind the graphics.

"It's a small small world." That was my first reaction. My second was, "man, we're a good combination!" (You can figure out who the 'we' is by reading his story.)

I wish more folks would give the MarsEdit and Conversant combination a spin, it really is almost effortless. ('Almost' because you still have to write the posts.)

(Look at how much Clark has posted since he found this combination! I can barely keep up with the new site.)

MetaWeblog.getRecentPosts: Conflict and Confusion

seth@macrobyte.net — Wed, 15 Sep 2004 10:18:58 GMT

MetaWeblog.getRecentPosts: Conflict and Confusion

I'm trying to fix an apparent bug in Conversant's support for the MetaWeblog and mt (movable type) api's. Conversant's Weblog II plugin can be used as a mt-compatible weblog, or a MetaWeblog-compatible weblog, or even just a blogger-compatible weblog.

In fact, all three of those api's build on each other. Blogger is the most basicc. MetaWeblog "embraces and extends" it. The mt api does the same to metaweblog. That's important to understanding the apparent conflict I've run into.

The MetaWeblog RFC has an entry point called MetaWeblog.getCategories. You tell it what weblog you want to know about, and who you are, and it returns the information about that weblog's categories. Specifically, the api documentation says:

metaWeblog.getCategories

metaWeblog.getCategories (blogid, username, password) returns struct

The struct returned contains one struct for each category, containing the following elements: description, htmlUrl and rssUrl.

This entry-point allows editing tools to offer category-routing as a feature.

So it's clearly supposed to return a struct of structs, as it says, "the struct returned contains one struct for each category..."

Yet, it seems like everybody else has implemented metaWeblog.getCategories to return an array of structs, rather than a struct of structs. Examples: XMLRPCNET and xoops.

What am I supposed to do? It wouldn't matter to me what other server software has done, since I'm not trying to interoperate with other servers, but I do need (Conversant) to work with the client software... which, of course, has been written to work with the other server software.

The metaweblog spec was written by Dave Winer, so it's safe to say that Radio (as a client app) implements the spec he wrote... yet it looks like most other applications (both client and server) have gone the other way. Ecto for Windows, for example, expects the result of metaWeblog.getCategories to be an array of structs. (However, ecto uses the XMLRPC.NET framework, so this isn't entirely Ecto's fault.)

Is there any way I can handle this to be compatible with both camps? A client app could accept either type of result (like NetNewsWire's editor probably does, if I know Brent), but most of them don't do that. Since Conversant is a server app, what should I do: follow the original spec, or follow the more common spec? The purist in me suggests the former, but the realist (the one who wants to make the customers happy) says the latter.

What a mess. Simon Fell calls this the problem of slightly uniform interfaces.

Strong Opinions

seth@macrobyte.net — Wed, 20 Aug 2003 10:27:21 GMT

I'm writing a tutorial for integrating Weblog II into a Conversant site. (The amount of writing I've been doing is the main reason this site has been so quiet.)

The Weblog II beta testers have been reviewing and critiquing pages/chapters of the tutorial as I deliver them. Last night, someone posted a rather "strong" opinion about one aspect of the tutorial. He said that to presume that the reader knows the basics -- like what a URL is -- turns the tutorial into a worthless piece of junk.

Ouch.

A couple of people instantly leapt to my defense, but here's a lightly-edited version (names remove) of my response to those defenses:

Strong words don't hurt me (much). In the long run, strongly-held opinions are what I need to help me turn this tutorial, and this software, into something exceptionally useful.

Let me explain: [this person] feels very strongly that I should be explaining everything, even the basics of the internet. I feel very strongly that I should be focusing on Weblog II and Conversant. Without a strongly held opposing viewpoint, I would do only and exactly what I think is needed. Now that I can take this other viewpoint into consideration, I'm willing to compromise by providing external links that explain the internet basics, where appropriate.

I don't plan for this tutorial to spend much time on the truly adavnced uses of Weblog II or Conversant, either. Again, though, if someone pushes really hard in that direction, it's bound to change my direction at least a little bit.

Having said that, I have to admit that "worthless piece of junk" stung a little, at first.

(Note: I post this not to reveal the inner workings of a private beta list, but because it shows my acceptance of strong debate at face-value. It's important to quickly move past the rhetoric and hear the intent of the message.)

That Was Support

seth@macrobyte.net — Sat, 05 Jul 2003 12:26:53 GMT

Thursday's post, "It Must Be Dave's Fault," was written in support of RSS, Dave, and UserLand. Apparently some people are unable to read between the lines.

Really, I was going to completely ignore the whole Echo "thing" until and unless something significant came of it, but it seems this is all anybody wants to talk about.

Would I like to have a better format than RSS 2.0? Uh... I guess. Depends on what "better" means... remember that part of being a good format is one which can be easily adopted. RSS is perfect, at least in that way.

How about a better protocol than MetaWeblog? Yes, that I'd be a little happier about. Conversant supports an unlimited number of vectors for metadata (categorization) in weblog posts. Last I checked, that couldn't be done with the MetaWeblog API. On the other hand, that can't be done with any of the current desktop weblog clients either, so it doesn't matter that much to me.

Adding support for a new syndication format will take a couple hours. Adding another protocol, especially one based on SOAP instead of XML-RPC, is something I don't even want to think about right now.

If Blogger weren't behind Echo (or whatever they're calling it now), I wouldn't be worried aobut this at all... it would be one of those projects that start with a huge burst of energy and noise, but then fades away to obscurity and fossilization. Unfortunately, with Blogger's mass and resources behind it, I'm afraid the rest of us won't be able to ignore it.

Speaking of Multiple Categorization Vectors...

seth@macrobyte.net — Sat, 05 Jul 2003 13:29:31 GMT

My last post mentioned that Conversant supports unlimited metadata (categorization) vectors for each post.

Coincidentally (I think), Brian Carnell just wrote about his use of this feature under the topic, "Wikis+Blogs=Conversant".

WYSIWYG Editing

seth@macrobyte.net — Wed, 18 Jun 2003 13:27:18 GMT

Thanks to Clark Venable's sponsorship, Conversant now has a nearly-complete WYSIWYG editor! You can see it in action here on my site (reply to this message) or on Clark's site.

It supports Internet Explorer on Windows, and Mozilla 1.3b+ on any platform. Same features in both browsers.

The HTML editor is a modified version of HTMLArea from InteractiveTools.com, built into a new Conversant plug-in.

At the moment it's only "nearly-complete" because it isn't configurable. Soon it will have a few options for which features to include in the toolbar.

Finally! Flip Blogs.

seth@macrobyte.net — Tue, 27 May 2003 18:11:22 GMT

Finally, after all these years, my friend and former employee Philippe Martin has his own weblog.

Flip helped write a number of the features in Conversant, including some of the lower-level functionality like "Labels," and he wrote lots of documentation and still occasionally helps out on the support site.

He's a Frenchman, but you'll see immediately that he's blogging in English. Perhaps as he grows more accustomed to the new weblog plugin, he'll switch to bi-lingual blogging. Let's hope!

This reminds me... it's about stinkin' time that I switch this site over to the new Weblog II plugin. How silly is it that I'm writing it but not using it, when all of the beta testers (except Duncan) have happily made the switch?

Searching Within a Weblog?

seth@macrobyte.net — Tue, 20 May 2003 20:44:26 GMT

Dave Winer has a new weblog search feature running on his site, which lets you, uh... search his weblog. It is a nifty feature, even if it doesn't sound it from my brilliant description.

This, of course, is why Conversant (not a weblog tool) and Weblog II (the new weblog plugin for Conversant) both have and make extensive use of a fully integrated search engine.

Two stories that talk about Dave's new app: one from Brian Carnell, and the other from Steve Ivy.

Now, as proof that Conversant's Weblog II already does this, here's a link showing where Brian mentions 'Winer' on his weblog, and another showing where Steve mentions 'Jodi' (his wife). Notice that the results of these searches are actually shown within the weblog.

That's just the first way that came to mind. You could also use the actual search page on each of those sites.

Having a fully integrated search engine is so very cool.

Manila to Conversant conversion tool

seth@macrobyte.net — Thu, 27 Mar 2003 13:58:23 GMT

Greg started, and I've now (nearly) completed, a tool for converting old Manila sites to new Conversant sites.

Conversant and Manila are very different pieces of software, written for different reasons, but they do have some overlap. It's that overlap that allows the conversion tool to set up a Conversant site based on the contents of a Manila site.

It doesn't yet convert the template(s) over, but it does:

Convert shortcuts to type-specific resources (images, links, text, etc)
Import all messages
Duplicate the site structure by publishing messages and creating directories
Import all images as attachments, and set up the image-messages to display the images just like in the Manila site
Set up a *new* Weblog page with all of the contents of the Manila weblog.

The Manila site can be local (running in the local copy of Frontier) or on a remote server if you have xml-rpc access. The Conversant site can also be local or on a remote server. Obviously, it runs fastest if they're both local.

We (Macrobyte) might release this tool (for free). It runs on both Frontier and Radio.

If you'd find a tool like this useful, please let me know (preferably via email).

Steve's Chain Gang for Processing Log Files

seth@macrobyte.net — Tue, 18 Mar 2003 19:00:20 GMT

Steve Ivy has created and documented a Linux-based log-file processing system for use with Conversant sites.

The short version:

Conversant mails his log files to him over night
cron tells fetchmail to retrieve the messages with the logfile attachments
Procmail sorts the mail (he receives log files for more than one site)
A python script pulls the attachment out of the email
cron runs analog to process the log files

Nice job, Steve!

My own system is much simpler, but not so automated. (I'm not that worried about my stats most of the time, except on recent posts like last night's mostly ignore essay on software.) My regular mail client downloads the log-email with all my other email, then I select them and run a script to extract the log files to separate folders for each site. If I feel like looking at the stats for any of the sites I run Analog manually, though lately I haven't been bothering (the logs will be there later if I ever need to take a look).

Ranchero Software Ships NetNewsWire 1.0

seth@macrobyte.net — Tue, 11 Feb 2003 17:42:02 GMT

Brent Simmons announced a few minutes ago that his company, Ranchero Software, has released NetNewsWire 1.0 (previously referred to as NetNewsWire Pro).

The free version, NetNewsWire Lite (released last year), is a RSS news aggregator. It reads RSS feeds from your favorite web sites and services, and allows you to read them "one item at a time" in a familiar, email-like interface.

NetNewsWire has all of the features of Lite, but adds some important features. The most important new feature, and the one that will certainly get the most press, is that it's a publishing tool. NNW allows you to write your own weblog posts and submit them to your weblog via one of the supported "Weblog API's."

Other new features include full scriptability, an outline-based notepad, a find command for searching through all of the items currently in the database, and a bunch of other stuff I'd list if I was pretending to be a brochure. (I'm just a satisfied user and one of Brent's friends.)

A bunch of people on the beta list paid for copies of NNW as soon as he made it possible to do so. I hope this is the beginning of NNW (and Brent) gaining the momentum and success they deserve.

Congratulations, Brent! You're a daddy!

Editing a Conversant Weblog with NetNewsWire Pro

seth@macrobyte.net — Thu, 06 Feb 2003 18:00:45 GMT

Ranchero Software (Brent Simmons) has posted instructions for editing a Conversant weblog with NetNewsWire Pro. The instructions were written by Robert Daeley.

This Is Accessibility?

seth@macrobyte.net — Tue, 28 Jan 2003 09:36:58 GMT

I've been discussing web form accessibility with Jim Byrne (of MCU) for the last week. Jim (and the company he works for) specializes in this stuff.

He tells me that screen readers (which "read" text on the screen, aloud, to blind individuals) just read across a web page from left to right. So if you have a navbar on the left, a web editing form in the middle, and more navigation on the right, what it "reads" won't make any sense at all.

I don't know yet if there's any difference between "screen readers" and "aural browsers," but I've asked for clarification. My understanding was that aural browsers understand HTML as well (or almost) as visual browsers like Mozilla and Explorer. If that's not the case, or if for some reason it turns out that most blind people don't have access to the "aural browsers," then I'm going to be very disgusted, and definitely motivated to do something to help.

More on this when I, um, know what I'm talking about. (or when I think I do)

RSD 1.0 in Conversant's Weblogs

seth@macrobyte.net — Wed, 18 Dec 2002 13:44:38 GMT

RSD is now fully supported in both types of Conversant's weblogs: the "old ones" (which is all that's publicly available) and the new Weblog II pages.

Daniel announced 1.0 this morning, and the changes from 0.6 were extremely trivial. Macrobyte announced full support this afternoon.

All Conversant weblogs support RSD automatically, and the default templates include the RSD "link" tag in the header (and it's very easy to add it to custom templates, you can see it in the header for my site if you look at the source).

It's gratifying to see something I participated in (RSD) gain traction so quickly in the industry. Most of the weblog tools either support or have announced plans to support RSD. Pretty cool.

RSD Moving to 1.0

seth@macrobyte.net — Tue, 17 Dec 2002 15:16:48 GMT

Daniel just sent out an email to inform interested parties that, tomorrow morning, RSD is moving to version 1.0. His proposal:

Fixes a bug in the declaration of RSD's default XML Name Space (it's been correct in the new Weblog plugin's RSD files all along, but I forgot to tell him about it).
Change the value of the api "name" attribute, from an actual name to a URL. I don't like this, and apparently Dave Winer doesn't either. (Daniel has apparently changed his mind on this one since Dave posted his comments.)
Change api's "rpcLink" attribute to, uh... something else. He hasn't decided yet between "location", "apiLink", "location", and "apiLocation".

It's surprising that Daniel is rushing to 1.0 so quickly (tomorrow morning?), since two of the three changes he wants to make are unclear, undecided, or both. Of course he wants to foster growth, "make it happen" more quickly, but RSD is already being adopted very quickly because it was so carefully considered in the first place. Less than one day from his announcement of the proposed changes to the actual release?

Can't let this end on a sour note, so I'll add that RSD is very cool. It's easy to support, flexible, and its existence is predicated on making software easier to use. If the spec goes GM a few days early, so what? That won't make it any less effective.

It Came to Me In a Dream

seth@macrobyte.net — Fri, 06 Dec 2002 09:46:08 GMT

Corinne says that I talked in my sleep last night. (No surprise there, I do it all the time.) Apparently I said, "I'll assume you heard me." When she asked what I was talking about, I mumbled something about CSS. (No, she didn't ask, "Who's CSS!?" ;-)

It's not clear how CSS slipped into my dreams, but I did wake up with the solution to a problem in the new weblog plugin that's been pestering me for almost a week now. A complete solution (that has nothing to do with CSS). In fact, in my dream I even wrote this solution down on a notepad in my office so I wouldn't forget it in the morning, because I apparently knew I was dreaming. Great logic! Write it down on a dream-notepad, so you won't forget?!

Well, it worked. I spent a few seconds looking for it this morning, realized it was a dream, and remembered the general idea. It's good, and will work. The beginners will get the simplicity they need, and the power users will have the flexibility and options they crave.

Thank you Mr. Dreamself, that's exactly what I was looking for: inspiration.

A Redesigned Redmonk

seth@macrobyte.net — Fri, 29 Nov 2002 12:36:47 GMT

Steve Ivy has totally redesigned his (Conversant-based) site to focus on the services he's offering as an independent software developer and web site designer.

It looks really great! I'm impressed (and, of course, a little jealous).

Vapor?

seth@macrobyte.net — Fri, 29 Nov 2002 14:45:25 GMT

A horse is a horse
Of course, of course.
A horse is a horse you see.

But if you can't see
the horse (of course)
then a horse it can not be.

Some of you will guess what this is about, if you think about it. Don't ask me to explain.

P.S. REST assured, there really is a meaningful thought there.

Weblogs 2.0 Progress

seth@macrobyte.net — Fri, 29 Nov 2002 19:54:45 GMT

The new plugin is moving along. Today I completed the user interface for the next component. Tomorrow I'll finish up the actual functionality of this piece, and put it on the servers for the beta testers and other developers to work with.

Things have been slow this week because of the holiday, but we're making progress. The whole plugin should be done sometime around mid-December.

Yep, It'll be RSS 2.0

seth@macrobyte.net — Mon, 25 Nov 2002 14:29:31 GMT

Dave says that they haven't had any problems with other services not accepting RSS 2.0. That's good, and it's what I expected. The new plugin is going to produce RSS 2 feeds by default.

RSS 2.0 Support?

seth@macrobyte.net — Sat, 23 Nov 2002 17:47:37 GMT

Weblog 2.0 has some pretty darn cool support for RSS, but at the moment it generates RSS 0.91 format by default.

Are there any common tools, services, or applications which support RSS but which are broken by feeds in version 2.0?

It's going to produce 2.0 feeds by default, unless there's a significant contraindication. From what I've seen, 2.0 feeds are treated like 0.9x feeds in most cases, ignoring the extra elements and attributes.

Is there any reason Weblog 2.0 should not produce RSS 2.0 feeds?

Harvey Kirkpatrick: Man About Town

seth@macrobyte.net — Thu, 21 Nov 2002 12:03:30 GMT

A few weeks ago, Harvey Kirkpatrick was looking for someone to help him set up a Radio Community Server and custom Radio installers. He contacted Brent first, and Brent was kind enough to recommend me.

The system is all set up. It's called "townblogs," and it's more than just a Radio hosting service.

itown.com is a big directory of towns. It doesn't have every town in the world, but most of them are in there (and if your town is missing, just ask them to add it). Each town has its own page.

The idea behind townblogs is that people like writing about their towns, so why not give them a place to do it?

It works like this: download a copy of itown Radio, and you have thirty days to decide if blogging is for you. If you enjoy it, then pay for your copy. If you are writing about your town then you can be listed on your town's page in the directory. Show it to your friends and maybe some of them will do the same thing about their towns. Link to each other. Then the search engines find you and your writing gains an audience as people read your writing to learn about your town.

The townblog sites are relaly nice looking. Bryan Bell did the theme and logo designs. (Yes, I'm a little jealous...)

Harvey is the man "about town" (excuse the pun). He's been dreaming about this for seven years, and it's finally starting to take shape. I hope it works out for him, I hope it's wildly successful.

I hope... I hope he eventually uses Conversant to host the itown directories. ;-)

The "Value" of My RSD Approach...

seth@macrobyte.net — Wed, 20 Nov 2002 12:13:42 GMT

Brent and Daniel are having a conversation about RSD on Daniel's site. Brent's planning to support something like RSD (hopefully RSD's final format) in NNW.

Brent's thoughts are that the document needs to be kept incredibly simple, but I don't understand why he's taking it so far. Our intent (or mine, anyway) is that...

Continued...

Sample RSD Document

seth@macrobyte.net — Tue, 19 Nov 2002 20:38:10 GMT

Here's the sample RSD document that I promised Daniel I'd write.

It's still very simple, but it allows the parameter (setting) names to vary in the different APIs without having to define a really big vocabulary for the XML.

Updated 20nov2002 with optional documentation elements moved to the api elements.