Re: [syndication] locating syndication feeds

[Julian Bond <julian_bond@voidstar.com>]

In article <m3bsm2f1ym.fsf@relativity.yi.org>, burtonator
<burton@relativity.yi.org> writes
>OCS is great but it is impossible to read and work with :(

I hesitate to suggest a new format standard (oh yeah?) but it's apparent
that OCS is not delivering the goods.

If you remove the <item>s from an RSS feed you're left with tags that
are purely about the channel. There's just one missing which is the url
of the feed. If you concatenate these together for multiple feeds you
have.

<?xml version="1.0" ?>
<rssfeeds version "0.1">
  <channel>              //1st channel
    <title>
    <link>
    <url>                //new element, the url of the xml for this feed
    <description>
    <language>
    [<other channel elements, optional in 0.92>]
  </channel>
  <channel>              //2nd channel
    //2nd channel elements
  </channel> 
                         // repeat <channel> as needed
</rssfeeds>

This is way simpler than OCS and gets the job done, doesn't it? It's
very easy for feed aggregators to both read and produce because they
probably already store all this data and will already have parsers
written that grab the data out of normal feeds. This layout then becomes
a fast, cheap and out of control way for aggregators to re-publish the
details of the feeds they've discovered. It also allows a big site with
multiple feeds to produce a single file that documents how to call all
of them. And in a machine readable way.

The only enhancement that immediately comes to mind is the addition of a
<category> channel element as defined for <item> in RSS 0.92   

Slightly worrying is the potential need for a <channel_list> element and
sub-elements describing the <channel> collection but I'm trying to
resist that. I suppose there should be an outside wrapper of <rssfeeds
version "0.5"></rssfeeds> or such like as well.

-- 
Julian Bond    email: julian_bond@voidstar.com
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