Re: [radio-userland] Payloads for RSS

[David Davies <d.a.davies@bham.ac.uk>]

I think this is a truly inspired addition to RSS and will help us in our use
of syndicated data no end. I can't wait to get going with it.

One thought though. I can imagine a danger of super-bloat with the enclosure
field in regular RSS channels. Suppose I subscribe to a hypothetical CNN
sports news channel and with this new enclosure element all its sports
stories come with a video clip of a sports game. Maybe I'm only interested
in following one team let alone one sport yet when I wake up in the morning
I find my personal aggregator (e.g. MyUserland on the Desktop) has
downloaded megabytes (tens, hundreds, more?) of videos of stuff I'm just not
interested in. Wow, there goes my hard disk.

What's the answer? More specific RSS channels?

On the radio-UserLand list we talked a little about further refinement of a
channel's data using a category or keyword element.

This is a difficult area because of standardisation of keyword
classification systems. At one level (e.g. some professional areas) there
are many standard classification systems in operation. In my own field of
medicine we have an international keyword system making highly specific data
syndication a lot easier. Granted, there is a lack of standardisation in
other areas though there are pointers such as Library of Congress or the
Dewey decimal system. There will always be other areas (personal weblogs
with automatic syndication are a good example) where no classification
system is ever going to emerge though maybe with these channels by
definition they're more focussed so you may not mind or even get lots of
unwanted enclosure elements.

This isn't a criticism, I think enclosures are a major leap forward, for me
and our application of RSS at least. Just trying to keep the discussion
moving forward.

Cheers,

David