Re: [syndication] OCS Version 0.5 draft

[Ian Davis <iand@internetalchemy.org>]

On Thursday, 05 September 2002 at 03:18, burton@openprivacy.org wrote:
> I can't help but think that the concept of an RSS feed is obsolete:
I assume you meant to write OCS here?

> 1.  We have ways to search for content on other peers via standard formats (SOAP
>     over any binding (JXTA, BEEP, HTTP))
Most users of OCS use it to list their own channels. They are the
authority for their channel list so no amount of peer discovery is
goingo to locate them - you have to ask the publisher.

> 2.  The format is bloated... 5k or so per channel.  It just isn't scalable to
>     millions of feeds
I think 5k is a little overstated. XML in general won't scale to
millions of feeds. OCS allows you to refer to other OCS files so you
can cascade a large directory. This also lets you split your directory
up into more useful segments, e.g. OCS file for channels recently
added, one for recently updated channels, one for channels that
haven't updated for over a week, one for OPML versions etc. All these
can be referred to by a master OCS file and the aggregator then has
some metadata to help decide about the channels it is about to fetch.

> 3.  We now have the mod_subscription spec [1] which can be used by RSS
>     readers/aggregators to discover other RSS channels and with the mod_link
>     spec one can link to additional RDF.
I'm not sure i really understand the purpose of the subscription
module in the context of an RSS channel. The examples don't make it
clear whether this is some kind of recommendation system or whether
the container rss channel is the aggregate of the two subscriptions
listed (wired, peerfear).

> Put these things together and it doesn't make sense to lug around OCS.
Since OCS is RDF also you could use your modules in your OCS file to
add additional functionality such as vendor subscription urls
(although I guess these are pretty fragile since a vendor may choose
to change their API at any time breaking hundreds of subscription
lists, perhaps it would be better for them to publish an RDF file
specifying how to build the subscription url for a particular type of
channel)

Ian