This link was posted to the Belgian weather forum yesterday. I repeat it
here in case it is of interest to anybody

http://science.slashdot.org/article....id=95&tid=103&
tid=152&tid=14 or http://makeashorterlink.com/?O29A13AF9

Colin Youngs
Brussels

"Colin Youngs" wrote in message


http://science.slashdot.org/article....id=95&tid=103&
tid=152&tid=14 or http://makeashorterlink.com/?O29A13AF9

"Wired reports the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration this
week began providing weather data in an open access XML format.
Previously, the data was technically available to the public, but in a
format that's not easily deciphered. How will the free and easy
availability of valuable data like this in XML affect the development of
the web? One example is Tom Groves SVG weather. This type of
visualization of XML data is about to fall within easy reach with
nothing more than a text editor required as an authoring tool. From
March 2005 SVG becomes part of the standard Mozilla/FireFox build. As an
example of how web standards are supposed to work, what more could you
hope to find?" We mentioned the policy change a few days ago. "


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Michael Mcneil wrote in message ...

:"Colin Youngs" wrote in message

:
http://science.slashdot.org/article....id=95&tid=103&
: tid=152&tid=14 or http://makeashorterlink.com/?O29A13AF9

I can't really translate it as I know little about web design. The NG has
a very wide readership and I thought there might be someone out there who is
interested in this.

Colin Youngs
Brussels

Michael Mcneil wrote:
"Colin Youngs" wrote in message



http://science.slashdot.org/article....id=95&tid=103&
tid=152&tid=14 or http://makeashorterlink.com/?O29A13AF9


"Wired reports the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration this
week began providing weather data in an open access XML format.
Previously, the data was technically available to the public, but in a
format that's not easily deciphered. How will the free and easy
availability of valuable data like this in XML affect the development of
the web? One example is Tom Groves SVG weather. This type of
visualization of XML data is about to fall within easy reach with
nothing more than a text editor required as an authoring tool. From
March 2005 SVG becomes part of the standard Mozilla/FireFox build. As an
example of how web standards are supposed to work, what more could you
hope to find?" We mentioned the policy change a few days ago. "



By publishing their data in XML format, NOAA are making it much easier
for developers to integrate into into their applications. The example
"Tom Groves SVG weather" (I've not seen it so i'm making an educated
guess) will use the NOAA XML data to produce some nice looking graphs
and charts entirely automatically. The abbreviation 'SVG' stands for
Scalable Vector Graphics, and it is this technology that is built into
Firefox (the new and much respected alternative to Internet explorer).
SVG is very much like 'macromedia flash' and has nothing specifically to
do with the weather, or NOAA. The example simply takes the NOAA data
and presents it to the viewer of a webpage as a nice colourful chart,
that is updated automatically.

I suspect the reason for this story being newsworthy is simply because
before NOAA presented data in XML, and before SVG was embedded in
firefox, it would have been considerably more difficult to interface the
two.

hope this explains some of the key issues, I'll be happy to expand if
it's of help.

br
Jim

(web designer)