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libnatl v0.1
Copyright (C) 2000 By David Sweet <dsweet@chaos.umd.edu> This software is licensed under the LGPL. See source files for more information.

Home Page: http://www.chaos.umd.edu/~dsweet/NATL

What is NATL?

NATL is the Network Audio Tuning Language. It is a system for describe, organizing, and accessing ("tuning" to) Internet audio streams. Pages include (i) the stream(s) to play, (ii) short textual description of the stream(s) and keywords for indexing/searching, (iii) hyperlinks with a "short" parameter which can be used for navigation on minimal user interface devices. For example, here's a 40 character x 3 line display. The top line holds the "short" descriptions, the second line holds the long description of the highlighted (I'm using all caps here to indicate highlighting) short description, and the third line tells what is currently playing. The stream that is playing in this example is a welcoming audio stream describing the (fictional) audio site to which you've navigated. (Ideally the title of the playing stream would stand out more [maybe it would be larger]).

+----------------------------------------+ | rock talk JAZZ pop fusn punk |

|     All jazz radio from New Orleans    |
|      Welcome to StreamPlace.com        |

+----------------------------------------+ Figure: The display portion of a Minimal User Interface for an NATL client.

NATL is described in the XML DTD, natl.dtd, and discussed in doc/natl.sgml (or doc/natl/natl.html if you prefer).

Take a look at test.natl for a sample of NATL. It's fairly intuitive if you know HTML (and maybe some SMIL -- see the <switch> tag).

Using libnatl:

There's no fancy packaging.

Try

        make
        ./tst

This should show you a breakdown of the tags in the file test.natl

The file libnatl.a is a small static library that can be used to parse NATL files according to the DTD (natl.dtd) of 7/11/2000. See natl.h for documentation and tst.c for a programming example.

Now you can compile knatalie, and Linux/KDE NATL client following the instructions in knat/README.

Please feel free to write to me with suggestions, contributions, etc. at dsweet@kde.org

Thanks,
David Sweet