Syndication::NewsML -- a NewsML library for Perl
    NewsML is a standard format for the markup of multimedia news content,
    ratified by the International Press Telecommunications Council
    (http://www.iptc.org). According to the newsml.org website NewsML is "An
    XML-based standard to represent and manage news throughout its
    lifecycle, including production, interchange, and consumer use."

    NewsML differs from simpler standards such as RSS in that RSS sends
    links to stories, where NewsML can be used to send links or the story
    itself, plus any associated information such as images, video or audio
    files, PDF documents, or any other type of data.

    NewsML also offers much more metadata information than RSS, including
    links between associated content; the ability to revoke, update or
    modify previously sent stories; support for sending the same story in
    multiple languages and/or formats; and a method for user-defined
    metadata known as Topic Sets.

    Syndication::NewsML is an object-oriented Perl interface to NewsML
    documents, allowing you to manage (and one day create) NewsML documents
    without any specialised NewsML or XML knowledge.

    You can find out more about NewsML at http://www.iptc.org/site/NewsML/
    or http://www.newsml.org/

LATEST VERSION AND WHAT'S NEW
    The latest version is 0.08, released 16 January 2002.

    Download: http://www.cpan.org/authors/id/B/BQ/BQUINN/

  What's New:

  v0.08 - Released to CPAN 16 Jan 2002

        - one simple bugfix to make the test suite pass...

  v0.07 - Released to CPAN 11 Jan 2002

        - Added some generic methods to Syndication::NewsML::Node (and
        therefore all object classes):

        o getXML -- return the current tag and all its children as an XML
        tree getContent -- same as above, but ignores the current container
        element (which means the resulting string may not be well-formed
        XML)
        o getText updated to get text of all children (bug fix)
        o getAllText -- return text in all child elements with no sanity
        checking, so you can even call this on the NewsML root element to
        retrieve all text in a document
          Thanks to Peter Hilbring for giving me the prodding required to get this
         done :-)

  v0.06 - 1 Nov 2001 (unreleased)

        - Enhanced examples/NewsMLParser.pl: now recurses through all
        NewsComponents. It's almost useful!

        - Made auto routines handle undefined elements/attributes better:
        now returns undef rather than croaks. Calling a method of an undef
        class still dies, though: that's Perl, there's nothing I can do
        about it -- so test your return codes.

    See the Changes file for previous releases.

INSTALLING Syndication::NewsML
    The lazy way to install Syndication::NewsML:

       $ perl -MCPAN -e shell
       cpan> install Syndication::NewsML

    Or the normal way:

    Retrieve the latest copy from CPAN:
    http://www.cpan.org/authors/id/B/BQ/BQUINN/

       $ perl Makefile.PL # Creates the Makefile
       $ make             # Runs the makefile
       $ make test        # Optional (See Interopability below)
       $ make install     # Installs Syndication::NewsML into  your Perl library location

    With this method you will first have to install the pre-requisite module
    XML::DOM. See the what are the prerequisites? entry elsewhere in this
    document.

  What Are The Prerequisites?

    *   XML::DOM (Have not tested lower than v1.27)

    *   Perl5 (Have not tested lower than v5.6)

    To get the latest versions of the prerequisite module you can simply
    type this at the command prompt:

       $ perl -MCPAN -e shell
       cpan> install XML::DOM

    or if you just 'install Syndication::NewsML' the CPAN module should
    automagically install all of the prerequisites for you.

  What Systems Does It Work With?

    Syndication::NewsML should work on any machine that supports XML::DOM,
    and any filesystem including Windows, although I haven't tested it on
    Windows yet. It's still early days, so expect some bugs.

WHERE ARE THE MANUALS?
    Once you've installed, you can type:

       $ perldoc Syndication::NewsML

GETTING HELP
    The best place to ask questions now would be the NewsML mailing list at
    http://groups.yahoo.com/group/newsml/, or ask me directly at
    brendan\@clueful.com.au. If there is enough demand we may start up a
    specialised list.

    General Perl/XML questions should be asked on the Perl-XML mailing list,
    which you can find at
    http://aspn.activestate.com/ASPN/Mail/Browse/Threaded/perl-xml

THE TEST SUITE & INTEROPERABILITY
    The standard "make test" test suite checks most elements in a small
    range of test NewsML documents obtained from the Net. You can find the
    test documents in the "t/test_data/" directory.

    I haven't written complete unit tests yet (after all there are 127
    classes), so some methods remain untested. However the test documents
    include a fairly standard range of elements, so you should be able to
    get somewhere with the methods that work so far.

BUGS and TODO
    There are probably bugs all over the place -- this is still an early
    version.

    At the moment, "Syndication::NewsML" only reads NewsML files -- in the
    future it should be able to modify and write them as well.

    See TODO for what I'm thinking of building and what would be nice to have.

AUTHOR AND COPYRIGHT
    This module is Copyright (C) 2001 by

            Brendan Quinn
            Clueful Consulting Pty Ltd
            GPO Box 2747EE
            Melbourne 3001
            Victoria, AUSTRALIA

    All rights reserved.

    This module is free software. It may be used, redistributed and/or
    modified under the same terms as Perl itself.

    $Id: README.pod,v 0.8 2002/01/16 04:37:56 brendan Exp $

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