"...This article will focus more on how to extract microformats data from the HTML, how the basic parsing rules work, and how they differ from XML..."

'Have you ever wanted to get a list of the links contained in a HTML page? Or a list of images, the title (...)'

Suppose you want to have some options on your bash shell script, some flags that you can use to alter its behavior. You could do the parsing directly, using ${#} to tell you how many arguments have been supplied, and testing ${1:0:1} to test the first character of the first argument to see if it is a minus sign.

"GNU Emacs 22.3 has been released, and is now available at
ftp.gnu.org/gnu/emacs/ and the GNU FTP mirrors (see http://www.gnu.org/order/ftp.html) [...] Emacs 22.3 is a bugfix release." --
* see also: fix for a security vulnerability

Yesterday we took a look at BashDiff, a patch for the bash shell that adds new capabilities. We've already looked at some of the additions that BashDiff makes to bash's commands and string parsing abilities. Today we'll look at modifying positional parameters, parsing XML, talking to ISAM and relational databases, creating GTK+2 GUIs, and a few other tricks and issues.

HTML Purifier is a project that helps you ensure that HTML is valid and does not contain cross-site scripting attempts or other nasty attacks. With HTML Purifier you can allow users to post HTML content without letting them insert nasty code that will run in the browser of anyone viewing that HTML.

"Microformats are open data formats that some Yahoo! sites support. You can't see them (unless you do a "view source" on a web page), but they're there -- bits of HTML that describe things like contact information (hcard), a review (hreview), an event (hcalendar), or a listing (hlisting). Microformats make data in web pages reuseable since the data is in a standard, canonical, format instead of just a jumble of HTML. Thousands of sites expose their data in Microformats, and that data is available for developers to use. One of the best opportunities for developers to make use of Microformats is in the forthcoming Firefox 3 web browser which features a new global Microformats object and API. The new API makes finding and parsing Microformats trivial and efficient..."

The days of parsing configuration files with awk and making quick changes to configuration files with ad-hoc scripts may finally be at an end. With Augeas you can forget about the parsing and focus completely on what settings must be changed. So if the configuration file moves a piece of data to the fourth column, you don't need to care; Augeas will still show it to you as it did before.

The WHATWG has said that parts of HTML 5 will be incorporated into browsers as and when they are finalized. We won't need to wait until the whole specification is completed and approved to start using some of the features of HTML 5. But what are the features of HTML 5?