{"id":3306,"date":"2010-12-19T22:31:54","date_gmt":"2010-12-20T03:31:54","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.n1zyy.com\/n1zyy\/?p=3306"},"modified":"2010-12-19T22:31:54","modified_gmt":"2010-12-20T03:31:54","slug":"standards-theyre-nice","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.n1zyy.com\/n1zyy\/2010\/12\/19\/standards-theyre-nice\/","title":{"rendered":"Standards: They’re Nice."},"content":{"rendered":"

I’m toying with building a small library that will take a URL, load and parse it (using Mechanize<\/a> and Loofah<\/a>), and spit out a title, description\/summary, and the ‘main’ image. Sometimes it’s a piece of cake, like when they have Open Graph<\/a> tags indicating all of that information in the headers. (I also plan to work on oEmbed<\/a> support.)<\/p>\n

But it’s a huge headache, because there are myriad standards, with most people not bothering to follow any<\/em> of them. I’ve learned about all sorts of declaring “the image” for a page, like og:image or a rel=”image_src” link, but most of the time I have to try to parse all the tags and find the biggest. But that’s really error-prone, because lots of people don’t bother setting height and width parameters on their images, so I end up picking a 16×16-pixel icon as the “biggest”. (I categorically refuse to actually download every image to extract its dimensions for this. It’s a huge waste of bandwidth.) On Lifehacker, my code typically returns a banner image as the largest image.<\/p>\n

And when an og:image is<\/em> defined in the headers, all bets are off for what it is. Maybe it’s the largest image on the page — yay! Maybe it’s a 64×64-pixel thumbnail. (Boo!) Or maybe it’s the site’s logo. It might be an absolute path, but it might be relative, in which case I have to construct a new URL to it based on what I think<\/em> the site’s domain is after account for having followed redirects.<\/p>\n

And then there’s just insane stuff. If no og:title is set, I try to get the tag. You wouldn’t believe how many times the <title> tag has HTML inside of it, like <h1> tags, or newlines. Often, <em>multiple<\/em> newlines, in the middle. On big, well-known sites. What the heck? Or the title is in ALL CAPS LIKE A CRAZY DERANGED PERSON IS WRITING for no apparent reason, so I’m inclined to <a href=\"http:\/\/apidock.com\/rails\/ActiveSupport\/CoreExtensions\/String\/Inflections\/titlecase\">titlecase<\/a> it. Or perhaps the title is actually just the site’s name. Or perhaps it’s actually the text “Untitled,” which is frighteningly common. Or perhaps there just <em>isn’t<\/em> a title.<\/p>\n<p>And don’t even get me <em>started<\/em> on character encoding.<\/p>\n<p>Right now, the code to extract these few bits of information is 124 lines, and I don’t feel anywhere near ready to change its name away from “Parser::Crude” yet. And I’ve really only implemented basic functionality thus far. I still need to add oEmbed, which is a huge can of worms.<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I’m toying with building a small library that will take a URL, load and parse it (using Mechanize and Loofah), and spit out a title, description\/summary, and the ‘main’ image. Sometimes it’s a piece of cake, like when they have … <a href=\"https:\/\/blogs.n1zyy.com\/n1zyy\/2010\/12\/19\/standards-theyre-nice\/\">Continue reading <span class=\"meta-nav\">→<\/span><\/a><\/p>","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3306","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.n1zyy.com\/n1zyy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3306","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.n1zyy.com\/n1zyy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.n1zyy.com\/n1zyy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.n1zyy.com\/n1zyy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.n1zyy.com\/n1zyy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3306"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.n1zyy.com\/n1zyy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3306\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.n1zyy.com\/n1zyy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3306"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.n1zyy.com\/n1zyy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3306"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.n1zyy.com\/n1zyy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3306"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}