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:
> Somehow I figured that you, Aaron, would be the first person to comment
> ;-)

Hey, what can I say? I'm just a tad hyperactive. ;-)

> Well, I also would prefer that this be a global ID. But, with many small
> providers/aggregators, it is IMHO in practice impossible to get such
> organizations to adopt the procedural mechanisms necessary to [properly
> issue globally unique IDs -- we can't even agree on what they should be!.

First, you didn't answer my first question: What is a "aggregation service"?

Second, it's easy to issue globally unique IDs -- they're called URIs. ;-)
I'd think everyone sending out syndicatable items would at least have access
to a small part of URI-space, and if not, I'd be happy to set up a service
to allow them to reserve some. So my global id would be:

http://theinfo.org/syndication/id/100121

> Well, I'm only using the DTD loosely here, to define the markup structure
> of only those lements I've defined in hte DTD -- the intention being that
> any other namespace-qualified elements would be perfectly ok.
> Unfortunately DTDs have no easy way of saying that ....

OK, it was just my understanding that elements marked PCDATA shouldn't be
touched by namespaces, but now that I think about it, it doesn't make any
sense, since a DTD wouldn't work with namespaces anyway.

> I inclued PICS ratings since this is the only current standard for
> specifying content ratings, and because I saw it in many other standards,
> but I must admit I did so with trepidation. It might be better dropped
> entirely. Thoughts?

Yes, I'd say drop it, and provide it as a module/namespace extension. I
don't believe it belongs in a generic syndication spec.

> Thanks, Aaron, for your well-posed questions and ideas. I will put up
> some revisions tomorrow, given a few minutes of spare time, of course ;-)

No problem! Thank you for your hard work on this very interesting area. I'm
glad I can help out with what I can.

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