how can I access DataEngines from JavaScript in the Web Plasmoids?

[Sebastian Kügler]

On Tuesday 05 January 2010 11:18:21 Marco Martin wrote:
> > Where's this separation of data and presentation? Where's the semantic
> > web that's been talked about for 10 years? Seriously, today's web sucks,
> > and it doesn't look good for tomorrow's.
> > 
> 
> there is a problem of mentality here that i'm starting to doubt it woud
>  ever  be overcomed: website owners want 100% control over the final look
>  of the web site/web app that will be presented to the user. things like
>  semantic web basically says: present the -content- in a way that makes
>  sense for a machine, then it becomes trivial to present the data in the
>  exact form the -user- or, the one wo designed the software that parses
>  this content wants.
> this scares contents creators to death, becase it will remove control from 
> them (especially because it becomes very easy to do things such as remove
>  ads) so now we have sites that explicitly forbids web scrapping or even if
>  they provide a sensible api its license is so ridiculous that's almost
>  impossible to actually use it and stay legal.

I agree that it's scary for content owners, but at the same side it's their problem. 
One of the things we're trying to achieve with Silk is to separate those two, for 
example by providing the data from a webservice as a dataengine, probably even 
abstracted away per service, like the videoengine does.

This way, we open up possibilities for new uses with the data, not only putting a new 
UI on top of it, but also being able to remix this information, and combine it. If 
some website owner goes belly up because they didn't feel it's a good idea to 
separate these two, well, then their product just didn't cut it. If your business 
model purely relies on webad income, bad luck. We're not responsible for unstable 
business models. In fact, it's something we're suffering from.

There's not reason for us to hold back on sensible technical implementations just 
because some company's business model sucks. Granted, those companies make our job 
harder, but the best way to have them change their mind is showing that they're 
missing out on some market and losing users because the user wants data/content, not 
messy websites with all of it mixed that only runs on very specific systems.
-- 
sebas

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