Exhibit-ionism
by Bijan Parsia
Exhibit really is charming. I did an experimental Exhibit of my publications, as listed on DBLP. I hacked up a little XSLT to scrape my DBLP pages for Bibtex (which is available; it’s like 14 xslt lines which is like 2 lines for you and me). Details are on the Exhibit itself.
It’s wasn’t bad at all, and the results are great. The original CSS layout was a little “roomy” for my taste, but that’s easy enough to tweak. It’s not accessible, at all. I think that will be easy to fix but the default should be a little less “live”. (It’s a bit tricky, because that will mix in the data a tiny bit, so if you update your data you have to update the page too; but c’mon!)
If FOAF data gave me a default home page as sexy as this, I’d probably have a FOAF file.
I do wish that all this lovely stuff wasn’t based on Javascript. I don’t know if Exhibit per se would be possible in a declarative, sub-Turing complete format (or reasonable, at least), but all the “show more/show less” toggley stuff is. Maybe the new HTML working group will save the day (ok, that’s snark for another day).
(Re puerility: DabbleDB is definitely easier to use. But, unless your data is in the Commons, you have to be signed in to the right degree to share, or you share a static document. Exhibit requires “normal web development” tools: XSLT, text editors, etc. etc., so you are a little removed from the data. But the results are free standing, which is just glorious. There’s no reason, of course, that you can’t have both.)