[redland] Redland News 2000-11-29

[Dave Beckett]

I've been mostly working on other projects but tinkering with some
missing bits in Redland and thinking about some of the other work yet
to be done.

* More work on the Redland RDF Parser (not yet released)

  + Can now find RDF content embedded in xhtml documents.  
  + XML Namespace stuff seems to work OK now.
  + Made it use Redland when present and work standalone too.
  + Added hook for supporting general containers that aren't just
    Seq, Bag and Alt (e.g. subclassed). 
  + Boring code restructuring to reduce those 500-line functions
    down a bit :-)
  + Estimate 50% of necessary work done for first release

* Fixed a few bugs with the RSS 1.0 viewer at
    http://www.redland.opensource.ac.uk/rss/
  caused by people submitting content.  That's why it is good to have
  public demos!

* Added Unicode / UTF-8 support code so that Redland can en/de-code
  it's internal string format of UTF-8 to and from ISO Latin-1 (and US ASCII).

  This is useful for creating HTML output which has a default charset
  of Latin-1 (and all the usual entities are Latin-1).  It is
  important to get I18 stuff working and this is a minimal step.  I
  hope to use the free libiconv library (or system iconv function
  with later GNU libcs) to do the full & proper UTF-8 <=> everything
  else conversions.

* Updated RDF 'database' demo at 
    http://www.redland.opensource.ac.uk/demo/
  to allow pasting of RDF/XML rather than needing a URI of content.

Dave