3 quick comments on this: I completely agree that a web view should be used for the "full" page, and the fact that the URL can come from the ROME code really makes our life so much easier! http://developer.android.com/resources/articles/using-webviews.html has some interesting information on using webviews with JavaScript within an Android Java app (that rascal Dalvik!), and I'm currently thinking that the "summary" item within the (expandable) list should be a web view of the <description> tag content (it's all HTML) . This will automagically create a DOM and JavaScript can be executed against it to get our information for search and filter requirements. I looked at the source again, and styling is wrapped in all those > and < strings - so now that I know where it happens, I'm good - (I can't stand loose ends!!! ;-) ). Good discussion, Harry. -julie Julie (Dingee) Carwellos Web and IT Project Analyst, User Experience and Interaction Designer LinkedIn - http://www.linkedin.com/in/jdingeecarwellos --- On Sat, 9/25/10, Harry Henriques <harry_henriques@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote: From: Harry Henriques <harry_henriques@xxxxxxxxxxx> Subject: [tssg-tech] Re: Parsing BostonEventsList with ROME To: tssg-tech@xxxxxxxxxxxxx Date: Saturday, September 25, 2010, 12:07 AM Please see my comments that are embedded in Julie's message, below. Best regards, Harry Henriques Java Developer From: Julie Carwellos <jcarwellos@xxxxxxxxx> To: tssg-tech@xxxxxxxxxxxxx Sent: Fri, September 24, 2010 2:13:01 PM Subject: [tssg-tech] Re: Parsing BostonEventsList with ROME Harry, you're right. We have an n-tiered app here - lots and lots of capabilities to be included (Java, JavaScript, XML, HTML, and we'll come across more, I'm sure). So it's important to be clear. The following might help, and anyone should jump in if I don't get it quite right: **************************** I hope everyone is clear on the fact that Java and JavaScript are as different as Java and C++. JavaScript is a unique language, and Java is another unique language. I don't believe that it is possible to mix the two languages into one executable bytecode file. ***************************** JDOM - Java's document object model for loading XML files so that app code can then traverse the model and pick and choose and change the information as it wants. DOM - X/DHTML's document object model, for the same reason, but it's with Javascript. In this case, the incoming file needs to be HTML (Xtended or Dynamic, hence the XHTML or DHTML). PHP and Perl I think can access the DOM, too. But Android gives you hooks to use Javascript in apps. Namespace is actually an XML thing, and the WWW Consortium has you put all kinds of special casing into your own namespace. That way, anyone could define something like a "book.xml" file in any way they wanted to, and as long as the xml referenced it's own namespace there'd be no confusion. In our case, if BEL had it's own namespace for RSS extensions, it could break down the XML tags into a much more granular level than the RSS standard defines (aka Extensions). If we're planning on displaying each event separately in an Android Web View, then each event has to become a valid HTML file, most of which is in the Description tag, and we can wrap it with the required HEAD and BODY tags. *************************** Because we have the URL of the "details page" thanks to ROME and JDOM, I thought that it would be a good idea to invoke the Adroid Web View (browser?) using the URL as a hyperlink. The cell phone user would get an un-massaged view of the "details page", and this "details page" has all the info that the cell phone user is interested in. Because we have the URL of the "details page", we could use HttpClient to retrieve this "details page" from the BEL server, and the BEL server would return an HTML page (completely intact) as a Java readable file. The Java file then could be parsed in the background to facilitate the "search" functionality and database functionality. As Julie has suggested, it may be easier to work directly with the info in the Description tag, provided by ROME / JDOM. The "details page" returned by the server is very involved. ************************** This brings up another issue - where's the CSS? I would think we'd need to develop a mobile.css, much as BEL probably already has files for print.css and for other devices. ************************** I'm not sure, but I don't think you would have to worry about Style Sheets. ************************** -julie