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Subject: 
Re: Publishing DAT files (was Re: B-Wing DAT file)
Newsgroups: 
lugnet.publish
Date: 
Tue, 13 Oct 1998 06:38:17 GMT
Viewed: 
850 times
  
Waaaay cool, Todd.
Of course, now I can think of a zillion ways ldlite could
work better, like putting a "Save As" option on the menu,
and having the zoom factor and viewing direction be set
from a menu, and Saving all the comment fields to a scrolling
text window so you could read all the author's notes.
-gyug

Todd Lehman wrote:

legoverse@geocities.com (Terry K) writes:

To put this thread back on charter, what is the best way to
publish Ldraw .dat files?   On my system, I have associated
.dat files with the program ldlite and with the mime type of
"application/x-ldraw".  If someone posted a .dat file with
that mime type, I *think* that when I read the article then
ldlite would pop up semi-automatically, which would be
really cool.  For those of you with perhaps more experience
doing the MIME thing with enclosures and all that, does this
sound like a good idea?

Neat idea! -- (Except all MIME posts are rejected by this newsserver...)

Alternatively, would it be useful if there were a special area on the www
part of the server for uploading .dat files, and having it index them and
serve them back as "application/x-ldraw"?

That sounds like an interesting idea, Todd.  Give it a shot.  I would
like to try it.

OK, here's what I came up with (feature list):

   * Storage on the lugnet.com server of LDraw .DAT files of models submitted,
     and the models are identified by their author.

   * Viewable by anyone with a web browser which can launch LDLITE (as Gyug
     explains on his webpage).  Server returns "application/x-ldraw" as
     content type.

   * For posterity, arbitrary comments by the author can be associated
     tightly with the .DAT files submitted.

   * New versions of models can be submitted by authors at any time.

   * Author's comments/descriptions/questions can be addressed by other
     people.  That is, there is support for discussions (or idolation :)
     revolving around a particular model.

   * No MIMEing is required, and no fancy software is needed to submit the
     .DAT files.

   * Rudimentary indexing and searching is provided.

OK, now how does it work?

Well...

All you do is -- just post a .DAT file -- and dat's it!  (Hee hee.)

(And you can even put a few paragraphs of text above your .DAT file in the
same post -- as long as the lines don't begin with numbers.)

Here's the magic part -- the web interface detects that the body of the
article contains LDraw content, and gives you the option to launch LDLITE
with contents of the article (after on-the-fly conversion to a .DAT file).
Then you just click on that link and up pops the file.

Er, hmm, it's probably easier just to show it action than to try to explain.
Here are two .DAT files which have been posted to this server:

   http://www.lugnet.com/news/display.cgi?lugnet.publish:6
   http://www.lugnet.com/news/display.cgi?lugnet.cad:20

There ya have it.  :)

I thought this would be a nice hybrid approach because:

   * It doesn't require any futzing around with MIME stuff anywhere on the
     server (all postings are still all-ASCII)

   * .DAT files can be posted from tin, trn, slrn, Pine, etc. -- any
     newsreader even if it doesn't support MIME posting.

   * You get to include extra info in with your .DAT file posting --
     for instance, just like you did in article #6 of lugnet.publish
     (linked above).

   * It's very tightly integrated with news, which is good for discussions.

   * It only took about 1 hour of coding (mostly refining the regex which
     recognizes LDraw .DAT content in article bodies).

   * Doesn't require any new "terms of use" for the site since it falls
     under the whole news thing.

Disadvantages of this approach:

   - You have to go to the web interface to see the visuals.  That is, since
     it doesn't make use of MIME, your browser can't display the .DAT files
     inline.

Well, give it shot...see what you think...

--Todd

p.s.  Here's the Perl5 regex I used to detect LDraw content in article
bodies:

   if ($art->Body() =~ m/^\s*[1-5](?:\s+[0-9]+)(?:\s+\-?[0-9]*\.?[0-9]*){6,12}(?:\s+\S+\.[Dd][Aa][Tt])?\s*$/m)

It a trade-off between accuracy and simplicity...it would be smarter if
it knew which lines had 6, 9, and 12 extra parameters, respectively, or
maybe it could group the numbers like   (?:(?:...){3}){2,4}  instead of
what it does...but I think it's probably accurate enough as-is.  But
comments would still be appreciated...  [Yeah, it should really be a /x
regex.]



Message has 1 Reply:
  Re: Publishing DAT files (was Re: B-Wing DAT file)
 
(...) Right now it's filtering out all lines which don't have a digit as their first non-whitespace character -- so the only author's notes that make it through are the ones beginning with 0. I was tempted to see if LDLITE would filter this out, and (...) (26 years ago, 13-Oct-98, to lugnet.publish)

Message is in Reply To:
  Re: Publishing DAT files (was Re: B-Wing DAT file)
 
(...) OK, here's what I came up with (feature list): * Storage on the lugnet.com server of LDraw .DAT files of models submitted, and the models are identified by their author. * Viewable by anyone with a web browser which can launch LDLITE (as Gyug (...) (26 years ago, 12-Oct-98, to lugnet.publish)

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