Re: [syndication] locating syndication feeds

[Mark Nottingham <mnot@mnot.net>]

Hi Rael.


On Tue, Jul 10, 2001 at 10:28:24PM -0700, Rael Dornfest wrote:
> Mark,
> 
> Thanks for taking the time to write this up; I'd very much like to see
> this happen and will contribute when and where I can.

Great!


> Just a quick comment on the format itself.  Why reinvent the wheel when:
> 
>   a) OCS [http://internetalchemy.org/ocs/index.html] already does much
       of this and more.  I've never particularly been a fan of OCS
>      -- gobs of folks find it confusing -- but it is already
>      understood and used by aggregators and readers.

I haven't worked with it, but I did take a look. To me, OCS seems to
solve a different problem - creating a new discovery infrastructure
for syndication that's independent. This proposal is working towards
a different case - how do I find out if there's a syndicated version
of the content I'm looking at?


>   B) Why not use RSS itself to produce channel lists?  Self-referential 
>      niftiness aside, it's already well understood by those wishing to
>      construct channel lists and leaves room for syndication of
>       syndicated feeds.  Of course it would take a tag or three in
>      0.9x, but 1.0 would require nothing more than a simple module
>      along the lines of what you've already mocked up.

True, but that gets political - I wanted something neutral. Who
knows, people may want to advertise ICE feeds as well (not sure it's
really possible, but what the hell...). Also, as others have noted,
it's not really well-suited; RSS does have channel-specific
semantics, and they don't fit this well, even if the form (a list)
does.


-- 
Mark Nottingham
http://www.mnot.net/