Weather Data Available in XML 198
wombatmobile writes "Wired reports the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration this week began providing weather data in an open access XML format. Previously, the data was technically available to the public, but in a format that's not easily deciphered. How will the free and easy availability of valuable data like this in XML affect the development of the web? One example is Tom Groves SVG weather. This type of visualization of XML data is about to fall within easy reach with nothing more than a text editor required as an authoring tool. From March 2005 SVG becomes part of the standard Mozilla/FireFox build. As an example of how web standards are supposed to work, what more could you hope to find?" We mentioned the policy change a few days ago.
Re:What's my lat and alt? (Score:4, Informative)
http://www.zipinfo.com/search/zipcode.htm [zipinfo.com]
Re:What's my lat and alt? (Score:5, Informative)
Extension for Firefox (Score:5, Informative)
Re:What's my lat and alt? (Score:5, Informative)
Speaking of the feed...here's the URL that contains the actual XML information:
http://www.nws.noaa.gov/forecasts/xml/ [noaa.gov]
I guess they didn't post it on the front page to decrease the slash effect.
Meanwhile, other governments still charge.. (Score:4, Informative)
This leads to two perverse situations:
Re:Extension for Firefox (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Why SOAP (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Meanwhile, other governments still charge.. (Score:5, Informative)
To make it "work" in Firefox... (Score:4, Informative)
So far all it's managed to do is make Firefox use 100% CPU, and not much else. Let me know if you have better luck.
IE just crashes.
URL for HTTP-fetchable XML (Score:5, Informative)
The URL points to the RSS versions of the XML feeds. These have actually been available for quite some time.
Re:Why SOAP (Score:3, Informative)
http://www.nws.noaa.gov/data/current_obs/seek.p
Re:SVG plugin for firefox? (Score:4, Informative)
http://mozilla.org/projects/svg/
another solution is to install svgview from adobe, like the 6.0 beta 1 and coppy the plugin files found in
if you want to use the mozilla implementation of SVG, recompile is the only solution for now. is there someone out there who would be willing to create this so-called 'patch'?
weather.com been doing this for a while (Score:5, Informative)
http://www.weather.com/services/xmloap.html? [weather.com]
sorry about the atrocious formating - slashcode made me take out whitespace (what is the fricking point of an ecode tag supported if you can't post a small snippet like this without removing all the whitespace!?)
Re:What's my lat and alt? (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Why SOAP (Score:4, Informative)
By using SOAP, I can use php/java/c++ and simply bind to their services isntead of having to roll my own weather-xml->object (or hashtable, or whatever) converter.
This is not for you to just hit with your browser/wget/whatever to stick weather on your webpage (although you can do that, it's easy if you post the right data), it's to allow you to write your own application that does whatever it wants with the data in an easy manner.
It's not flat xml files based on city as per your example because that wouldn't make any sense. If you read through their api's there's a lot of data you can get based on long/lat or weather station id or........
Re:Weather Market (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Meanwhile, other governments still charge.. (Score:2, Informative)
(1) In fact pilots get weather information for free in the UK.
(2) And if pilots did have to pay, wouldn't that be right? Somebody has to pay, in order for the service to exist: why should the general taxpayer subsidise the hobbies of people who are so insanely rich that they can afford to fly aeroplanes for fun?