WSIL? Was Re: RSS Auto-Discovery 2.0

(Cross posted.)

I think whatever becomes of this directory format be inclusive of many of the formats 
that feeds exist in RSS x.9x, 1.0, 2.0, Echo in addition to Web services. 

From my own experience and others the OPML/blogroll formats are all over the place. 
(See Meg Hourihan recent post on the subject for more: http://www.megnut.com/
technology/007388.asp) There really was never a specification to my knowledge. Being 
frozen and not supporting proper (read: determinable) extensibility, I'm not in favor of 
pursuing anything based on OPML or existing "blogroll" formats.

Joe's link tag idea[1] seems fine, but it doesn't seem scalable. Won't I have to repeat all of 
that information in every one of my HTML pages? Won't that be a major pain for some 
like Yahoo that could have hundreds of these? Perhaps I'm reading it incorrectly.

While everyone is throwing out ideas I figured I may as well unearth this one for some 
additional food for thought:

WSIL meets RSS. 
http://www.mplode.com/tima/archives/000170.html

WSIL is Web Services Inspection Language. It seems right in line with what we are talking 
about here. WSIL may not exactly be the ticket since its an under utilized and seemingly 
abandoned specification -- then again wasn't that the case for RSS?

Here is a topline of the case I made then:

* I have asserted that RSS syndication feeds are Web services and perhaps the most 
widely deployed Web services across the Internet. 

* In many ways, WSIL is like RSS for Web services. RSS is a file format with pointers to 
published content that can be syndicated and aggregated. WSIL is a file format with 
references to published Web services that can be discovered and bound. 

* I find WSIL intriguing because of its simplicity and lightweight implementation is more 
RESTful then UDDI. WSIL leaves the processing logic to the developer and makes its 
information trivial to access creating the potential for innovative and novel applications 
arise. 

Back when I wrote the above post I created a few quick and rough samples:

http://www.mplode.com/tima/index.wsil
http://www.mplode.com/tima/index-rsd.wsil

One of WSIL's nifty traits is that it can point to other WSIL files which can be helpful with 
large and distributed sites. For example using Troy Hakala's case[2] Yahoo! could have a 
main WSIL file, http://www.yahoo.com/index.wsil, that cover their primary feeds and 
points to other sections WSIL files like http://sports.yahoo.com/index.wsil and http://
finance.yahoo.com/index.wsil and so on. Another benefit, if Yahoo! would introduce 
some Web service interfaces, they too could be included in these files for applications to 
auto discover.

<tim/>

[1] http://groups.yahoo.com/group/aggregators/message/575
[2] http://groups.yahoo.com/group/aggregators/message/574



 

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