[thesite] Tip Harvester question (was: [***] Formatting tips )

Seth Bienek seth at sethbienek.com
Fri Mar 30 14:24:42 CST 2001


Hey Dean,

The flexibility of being able to parse tips within tips is useful, but are
we willing to assume the performance hit of recursive parsing?  Also, tip
tags should not be nested IMO because each tip is it's own simple entity,
and keping track of nested tips' relationships seems like it would be a
nightmare, unless the idea is to store them independent of their parent(s)
or child(ren), in which case, is the parent tag incomplete without the tip
that was contained inside it? Or is the 'child' tip left in the original tip
and stored redundantly as it's own tip as well?  I am open to discussion on
this because it's a possibility that I'm overlooking some of the usefulness
of this feature.

Parsing only text before "-----Original Message-----" could keep good tips
from being stored, depending on the method people use to reply.  Also, I
think that Outlook is the mail prog of choice for only a small percentage of
our members (unfortunately), so I would question whether this feature is
worth the processing overhead for the additional messages.  Again, I could
be talked out of these assumptions.  Sometimes thinking "outside the box" is
a challenge for me.

Do I get points for using the obnoxious cliche?


Seth

------------------------------
Seth Bienek
Solutions Development Manager
Stonebridge Technologies, Inc.
972.455.7294 tel
972.404.9754 fax
ICQ #7673959
------------------------------

> -----Original Message-----
> From: thesite-admin at lists.evolt.org
> [mailto:thesite-admin at lists.evolt.org]On Behalf Of Dean Mah
> Sent: Friday, March 30, 2001 2:09 PM
> To: thesite at lists.evolt.org
> Subject: Re: [thesite] Tip Harvester question (was: [***] Formatting
> tips )
>
>
> When I was working on the Perl version I grabbed tips where the tag
> appeared as the first non-whitespace characters.  I would also skip
> over the part of a message that followed the "--- Original Message
> ---" text that Outlook tends to put in for quoted messages.  I would
> also handle tips within tips, i.e., if you had something like:
>
> <tip>
> <tip>
> </tip>
> </tip>
>
> it would pull it out as two separate tips, which would happen from time
> to time.
>
> Dean






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