Re: [syndication] generic minimal set desired in a data syndication message?

[Ian Graham <ian.graham@utoronto.ca>]

On Mon, 21 Aug 2000, Seth Russell wrote:
> 
> Ok I'm game.  What is that generic minimal set?  Would it have all the
> tags you see in ICE?  Perhaps you could share your list with us.

Okey Dokey. I've written up a short XML document that roughly outlines
what I think of as the 'minimal' set of information needed in a message
containing syndicated data -- consisting of a small set of tags plus an
outline for a standard message syntax. I suppose you could argue that this
is a subset of ICE, but in practice it was arrived at without reference to
the ICE standard. Moreover, I am not a big ICE fan -- I think that ICE
tries to do too much in one spec (SOAP/XML-RPC - like protocol
information, loads of application-specific syndication rules, etc.), and
I've left almost all of this out.  IMO, most of this stuff should be in a
separate spec (SOAP, for example.) or in namespace-based extensions to a
small basic syndication spec. Later on, if there is agreement on new
features, they could be integrated into later versions of the spec.

The document is found at either of:

http://www.java.utoronto.ca/news/syndication-3.txt
http://www.java.utoronto.ca/news/syndication-3.xml

(same document, different MIME type). The XML comments and PCDATA content
provide some commentary explaining the reasons for certain designs /
choices. As I mentioned in my previous note, I haven't used RDF or
namespaces, simply to make the concepts clearer. 

Basically, the model is a nested data structure of 'message' elements,
where each message element contains:

  - information on how the message can be 'accessed' from a server
  - metadata about the message  (last modified, creator/owner, copyright)
  - syndication rules for the message
  - textual metadata (overview, keywords, etc.) for the message
  - message data
  - additional messages nested inside the message 

I look forward to comments/feedback on this. However, please not that I
will have only intermittent mail access for the next 2 days or so, so
please don't interpret a lack of response in the wrong way -- I'll be back
online soon. ;-)

Ian