So, I’ve been working on this project for some time now, where I’d take user supplied HTML templates and transformed them into new templates, that our system can actually use.

I needed to mangle and change them, but I also didn’t want to require from users things like well-formedness and other stuff that makes sense only to web developers (and sadly not even to all of them). Mainly, I want this stuff to be used by everyone, even those with retarded web editors and if it’s good enough to be displayed in their browsers, it ought to be good enough for me.

This decision was made a lot easier, when I discovered Beautiful Soup . It’s a python module that makes screen-scraping much easier, but what is even more cool, is that it makes changing documents, even those with bad markup, extremely easy.

If you are a python developer, who needs to extract information from or possibly change documents with bad markup, this is the module to use. It will save you time, keep you sane and make you rich. Well, two out of three ain’t bad either.

Update: Beautiful Soup has issues with Javascript code included in HTML.

Error: No such file found! Please make sure http://markos.gaivo.net/blog/code/framestack1.txt exists.

So, Google has an IM now. Nice that they are using Jabber, but it would be even nicer if their server talked to others too. Otherwise this is just another walled garden.

True, there’s an offer to federate with others, but this makes as much sense as having connection agreements between email servers. If they want a really open IM, then they should let their server work as Jabber was designed. Everyone can play and set up their own server.

On a different note, does anyone know of a good open source Jabber server that can actually handle 10k simultaneous connections and doesn’t go crazy every now and then?

Update: According to Joe Beda there are 3 reasons for staying close:

• Missing code needed for interoperability.
• They want to develop abuse/spam countermeasures.
• They want to ensure everybody really talks to everybody.

I can certainly sympathize with first reason, if true (and I have no reason to doubt it). But it’s harder to agree with other two.

You already have a contact authorization to limit such behavior. If this is not enough, the correct way would be to be as open as a lot of Jabber servers are and switch on protective measures after you’ve developed them together with Jabber community.

It also shouldn’t be up to Google to dictate how open other providers should be. That decision should be left with administrators of Jabber servers and they shouldn’t be coerced into Google’s policy. Basically they should keep the same freedom email server administrators enjoy right now.