Re: [syndication] RSS in Two Directions

[Aaron Swartz <aswartz@swartzfam.com>]

Dave Winer <dave@userland.com> wrote:

> One thing I'd like to have in this XMLization is an understanding of levels.

I'm assuming that you are writing your work in an outliner, so the outliner
would understand the different levels, right? Unfortunately, this doesn't
come out in any of the formats. The HTML one just wraps a <b> around
everything, and the RSS/ScriptingNews ones flatten it and treat it as a
separate article. Perhaps Pike should have an XML format for these sorts of
things?

> I also think that such a new format would have to allow for a subset of HTML
> markup in the equivalent of <items>. It doesn't have to be rendered in HTML,
> and the content would have to make sense if the HTML were stripped out.

Yeah, I'm wondering how to do this for my new aggregator. I want to be able
to accept information in multiple formats, then convert/provide the best
format for each form of display. I can certainly see accepting bold and
italics tags, and another set that could be converted into an ASCII format
that made sense. (<b>bold</b> become _bold_ and <i>italics</i> becomes
*italics*, URLs are turned into footnotes(1) and placed at the bottom of the
paragraph, etc.) I suggest ASCII, because if it can survive ASCII, it can
survive anything.

(1) http://www.someurl.com/this_is_a_footnote

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        Aaron Swartz         |"This information is top security.
<http://swartzfam.com/aaron/>|     When you have read it, destroy yourself."
  <http://www.theinfo.org/>  |             - Marshall McLuhan