patch to extract license data

[Sam Ruby]

Nathan Kinkade wrote:
> 2007/11/11, Sam Ruby <rubys at intertwingly.net>:
> <snip>
>> Meanwhile, I'm test drive a subtle change to the template that I use
>> (themes/asf) so that the rights and license information present in the
>> feed is visible.  At the bottom of every post is the author information.
>>   When this information is present, the simple word "by" will be
>> replaced by the (c) character, and it will be associated with a hypertext
>> link to the license and/or a mouseover text with the rights information.
>>
>> You can see an example of the result here:
>>
>>    http://planet.intertwingly.net/
>>
>> Any advice you might have on best practices for displaying this
>> information is welcome.
>>
>> - Sam Ruby
> 
> Quick question: for your tests above, are you using some of the
> changes I made, or has the license info always been extracted and
> exposed to the template?  I'll feel silly indeed if I went about
> hacking up planet/shell/tmpl.py only to reinvent the wheel.

XSLT and Genshi templates have access to the full output of the feed 
parser.  Django and htmltmpl only have access to a subset.

My templates are based on XSLT.

> Re: best practices for displaying licensing information.  I suspect
> that it's largely a personal matter.  Of course, Creative Commons
> would probably advocate making a more explicit/visible license
> declaration in order to disambiguate the issue up front.  Here are a
> couple of pages that might be of use:
> 
> http://wiki.creativecommons.org/Marking
> http://wiki.creativecommons.org/Marking_Works_Technical
> 
> Again, you can see how we've chosen to implement it at
> http://planet.creativecommons.org ... look below the title, next to
> author and date.  It's a little verbose for my taste, but that's how I
> was asked to make it look.
> 
> My only reservation about your tests with the (c) symbol is that it's
> not clear that that is a link, and unless a consumer of the feeds
> happens to hover their mouse over it, then they are likely to go away
> thinking that it's an "All Rights Reserved" affair, which I think is
> the common association people have with that symbol.  In any case,
> complete copyrights are implicit and don't necessarily need to be
> stated.  I think the most important thing is to make it clear when
> something has alternative copyrights applied to it.  How one goes
> about doing that isn't black and white, but something like "(c), 2007.
> Some Rights Reserved" is one idea.

I do want something minimal.  Will research and think about this some more.

> Nathan

- Sam Ruby