Re: Third draft of a generic syndication markup language

[Aaron Swartz <aswartz@swartzfam.com>]

Ian Graham <ian.graham@utoronto.ca> wrote:

> Comments, criticism, suggestions and contributions are, as always, greatly
> appreciated.

Here are my thoughts from a first look:

> uuid: A unique identifier for this item or collection. This is
> unique only within a given aggregation service.

What means an aggregation service? Personally, I'd prefer this to be a
globally unique URI -- I think that'd cause much less confusion.

You also have a mistake down near the description of collection/item/data --
you repeat the description, with the wrong element names.

> creator contains human language-independent information about
> the creator (person, organization, etc.) that has created
> the data content of the message.

What does this mean? A short description? A name? This isn't clear.

> This may be different from the organization providing the metadata (which is
> defined by the creator element of a containing 'collection' element, or is
> implied by the information in a serviceInfo element).

It seems that the organization would do better if defined explicitly. The
creator element of a containing collection element seems a really bad place
to put it.

> information for contacting the creators of the data.

Again, this is vague -- and since the content is PCDATA, I can't even use
things like Dublin Core to clarify the meaning.

> picsRating contains 'PICS" rating information. Everybody loves
> ratings

Not exactly. What is a specific ratings system like PICS doing in a generic
syndication spec? Generalize! It seems a lot of this stuff would do better
if it were opened up by use of namespaces to allow others systems to
describe some of these things.

Otherwise, it looks like your work is really progressing. I'm trying hard to
think of actual things you've left out, but I think that in general the spec
would do better if it clarified some terminology and allowed people to
specify more specific items in general categories (via namespaces).

I'll mull over this and be sure to send on future thoughts,
-- 
        Aaron Swartz         |"This information is top security.
<http://swartzfam.com/aaron/>|     When you have read it, destroy yourself."
  <http://www.theinfo.org/>  |             - Marshall McLuhan