Quoted-Printable

DeLynn Berry has just finished porting the improved hatom goodness of Scribbish to the Mephisto version. Oh, and this new version makes use of some new features in Mephisto 0.7, so make sure you’re up to date. Thanks, DeLynn. I hereby proclaim you the official maintainer of the Mephisto branch.

The hAtom specification has changed a bit since I implemented it in Scribbish. It was very much in draft-form at that time, and has now matured to verion 0.1. This morning I updated the typo version of Scribbish in SVN to use the new 0.1 API. I’ll work on the Mephisto version later on tonight. Now you can actually use an hAtom parser, like the Almost Universal Microformats Parser to extract content from a Scribbish-powered blog.

Here’s the parser’s output for QuotedPrintable.

The latest version of typo adds the ability to override article views from within themes, thus making it possible to theme the previously un-themeable. While I tend to prefer the simplicity of the old engine (which saw only the modification of a single layout file), it always bothered me that I couldn’t change some of the markup that typo produced. Not anymore: most of the views from app/views/articles/ are now re-implemented by Scribbish to produce microformatted html, specifically, an emerging specification called hAtom.

Aside from more obvious reasons (and specifically when it comes to creating a ‘default’ theme), using a standard such as hAtom frees one from having to force thier own (subjective) naming conventions on other developers. Since Scribbish aims to be a good starting place, and in its first incarnation implemented standardized markup for layout, the next logical extension was to standardize the markup used to render posts and comments.

In addition to being semantic, the hAtom format is both machine and human readable, and provides the designer with more than enough hooks for styling.

(Actually, the fact that there are sufficient css hooks is more a side-effect of a semantic specification like hAtom than it is a design goal. It just so happens that good markup and style go hand-in-hand—see below.)

Here’s an (abbreviated) example of the markup that’s now produced by Scribbish for each blog article:

<div class="atomentry" id="article-1">
  <h2 class="title">Some post</h2>
  <p class="author">Author ...</p>
  <div class="content">
    ...
  </div>

  <ul class="meta">
    <li class="categories">foo</li>
    ...
    <li class="tags">bar</li>
  </ul>
</div>

The accompanying css would go something like this:

#content .atomentry {}
#content .atomentry .title {}
#content .atomentry .author {}
#content .atomentry .content {}
#content .atomentry .meta {}
#content .atomentry .meta .categories {}

To find out more, check out the full specification at http://microformats.org/wiki/hatom, or view the source of your typo blog once you’ve applied the theme.

Visit the download page for Scribbish where you can get the latest version (0.2, for typo 2.6.0) as well as older versions.

I should also note that I’m not yet running Scribbish-0.2 here (at Planet Argon) because it requires typo-2.6.0 (which in turn requires Rails 0.14.1). I’m sure PA will be upgrading to the latest Rails release soon.