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Re: [syndication] shared feed lists

On Tue, Oct 14, 2003 at 05:26:18PM +0100, Julian Bond wrote:
> 
> 2) Having a spec that says <link> in the <head> of the html returned by 
> the root of a directory is more flexible than 
> thisStandardFileName.extension in the root of a directory.

Certainly.

> But we're stuffing a lot of these into <head> now. Which one is the
> subscriptions list?

We'd have to define the right attributes.

> So now we have to allocate a rel= value to this specific need.  It's
> enough to make you think there should be another layer of
> indirection here; have every web page include a single <link
> rel="metadata" href=""> which points to a file with a list of
> metadata files each of which can contain one or more bits and types
> of metadata.  I know "every problem in computing can be solved with
> another layer of indirection", but this is getting a bit daft isn't
> it?

Yes.  And I'm starting to think we may need that soon, it's going to
be long time before we can expect it to happen.  It's a much larger
change in my mind. 

> 4) I don't much like OPML for this because using attributes instead of 
> sub-tags looks messy to me (There, I've said it). But then I'm not a big 
> fan of OCS either. On the surface this is a pretty simple requirement 
> and I'm not sure why I should need a full RDF parser to extract the 
> names and URLs of the feeds.

Yeah.  I seems that OPML isn't quite "big" or "strict" enough while
OCS is likely overkill for this need.

> 5) I don't see how we can get away with saying only RSS feeds should 
> appear in this list.

I don't think we should.

> Apart from identifying the different types of RSS, you can pretty
> much guarantee that someone will want to include atom feeds (or
> whatever its called now). I can see a need for listing off OCS feeds
> as well. I can feel this heading into the conclusion of 2) above.
> this here list file could be a general purpose Metadata pointer
> file.

The format should allow any feed type to be identified, assuming the
feed has a URL which identifies it.

> My unconsidered opinion is that a way of listing RSS feeds in a machine 
> readable format is a good thing. So I agree with DW on this.

Excellent.

> And putting a <link href> pointer to it in the <head> of the index 
> document in directories is a good thing. Even if there's *also* a 
> standard name for the file.

Agreed.

> But then I'll probably change my mind tomorrow or at least think of more 
> issues that this throws up.

Well, we just need to finalized things today, then. :-)

Jeremy
-- 
Jeremy D. Zawodny     |  Perl, Web, MySQL, Linux Magazine, Yahoo!
<Jeremy@Zawodny.com>  |  http://jeremy.zawodny.com/