Web Feeds
I looked through Common Crawl and found over 500,000 parseable RSS/Atom feeds, confirming that Web feeds are still a major part of the Open Web. But most aren’t high quality, and autodiscovery often points users at stale or abandoned feeds.
Web feeds could be so much more if we put some effort into them. This post explores how we could start.
Rob Sayre points out that this blog still doesn’t show a preference for Atom, embarrassingly enough.
Huh. The Atom Format RFC has been out for a while, and as one of the authors, I get the odd mail now and again asking a question or just saying “thanks.”
Feed Paging and Archiving (nee Feed History) has finally made it to a standards-track RFC.
Over the weekend, I submitted a new draft of Feed History.
Atom has finally realised its most important advantage over the various flavours of RSS — it’s a Standards-Track RFC.
Feed History draft -04 is out, with the only major change being the replacement of fh:stateful with fh:incremental, with corresponding changes throughout the document, to make the concepts a bit clearer.
Draft -03 of Feed History: Enabling Stateful Syndication is now available. Significant changes include:
After more than five years, syndication is maturing rapidly. It’s being used for more than blogging — whether it be stock quotes, system logs, or order lists — and even blogging will change in nature as it gets more popular; people will be using blogs to fundamentally change the way they do business, inside and outside the firewall.
Way back when I put the first Atom drafts together, I included a placeholder for a section that I hoped would allow reconstruction of feed state. Presently, this often isn’t necessary, because you have to be away for a seriously long time (e.g, on vacation) before you actually miss anything. However, I’d put forth that this state of grace is going to be increasingly unlikely.
A few people got together in NYC to talk about Atom going to the W3C this morning. One part of the minutes of this discussion raised my eyebrows a fair amount;
In an otherwise excellent article, Jon Udell blames the lack of one-click subscribe in syndication formats on lack of vision:
This is the way syndication should be; user-customisable and aligned with the Web view of the resources it talks about. Cool.
As you may know, I’m editing the Atom format draft in my copious spare time, but not actively participating in the community (I am watching, but I don’t have the time to really dig in).
Jeremy Allaire is writing about something he calls RSS-Data, and I must say it touches on a lot of interesting points. A few;
Tim Bray wonders what the difference between an RSS feed delivered via HTTP and an e-mail folder (e.g., via IMAP) is; I’ve wondered the same thing myself. As far as I can tell;
Somehow, I’ve been drafted into editing the Atom syntax specification, and have just thrown up a first draft.
Mark Pilgrim is starting to think about issues surrounding the transport, transfer and general moving around of the Format Formerly Known as Echo (nee Pie).
Dave Winer has announced a few changes to RSS, which seem positive at first glance, but need a little closer inspection.
Sam Ruby suggests a roadmap for a new effort that may very well replace RSS.
I’m surprised by Dave Winer’s continuing reluctance to identify RSS 2.0 with a namespace, given how strongly he feels about interoperability and respecting format definitions.
Dave Winer argues that RSS implementers should toe the line:
Tim Bray thinks out loud about mechanisms to allow RSS subscribers to be counted. His poison of choice is adding a query components to the URI in the Referrer header.
Don wants to send RSS to OASIS, of all places. Doesn’t that mean it’ll have to be corporations standardizing it? Urgh.
Don, Sam, Ben, Mena and others have started blogging about a profile of RSS.
Excellent. Danny Ayers proposes a
Simple Semantic Resolution RSS 2.0 Module.
I’m setting up a weblog for a fairly well-known colleague, and doing some traffic estimates to try to size his server.
Sam mentions dc:date; that’s what I was thinking, except that ‘date’ on its own is pretty useless. As Bill points out, dcterms gives you different date semantics.
Sam proposes some changes to RSS 2.0 regarding namespaces. My first question was, “why?” but upon reading his next post, I get it.
Tim says that RSS Needs Fixing. Right on! Some people are intereted in endless tinkering with RSS - I’m not. I’m interested in putting it on everybody’s desktop, and making it transparent to them. This means we need better interop.
RSS needs a bit of stablity (as I’ve often said), so I’ve gotten off of my duff and done something about it.
Jorgen hits a subject that’s of great interest to me; RSS standardization. I originally started the Syndication list to get RSS moving towards some sort of
recognized standard; more recently, my effort to register an RSS media type was stalled by the lack of a stable spec published by a recognized group.
Wouldn’t it be great if The Royal Society, the Commonwealth Club and your local council all had RSS feeds available, conspiquous and up-to-date?
RSS: XHTML Profile, to me, is another proof that syntax isn’t important, as long as you can boil whatever you get down to a format you know. Nice job!
I see Dave is once again rev’ing RSS. I have reservations about the some of the new mechanisms (e.g., shoe-horning MIME into XML is a horrible idea) but I’m encouraged by hints that using XML Namespaces is being considered. IMHO the smart thing for Dave to do would be to start a version of “Minimal RSS”; maybe 0.95, that is just the very, very core markup (say, title, link and description, maybe one or two others for channel metadata) and put EVERYTHING else in modules (coordinating the release of them with the spec). This would produce a very stable core spec that would allow him to experiment with new facilities with impunity, whilst strengthening 0.9x’s position; my impression is that most people use 1.0 because of Namepaces, not RDF.
Interesting; I’m glad thiswas written, because RDF is good stuff, and this is a good walkthrough.
