RE: Behind the times

Maybe there is too much emphasis on 'aggregators' (and by implication
'newsreaders') here.

I would suggest that we could usefully distinguish between the 'really
simple syndication' branch of RSS who are concerned primarily with
syndicating ephemeral content such as news headlines and blog entries and
the 'RDF site summary' brach who are more concerned with a generic means for
packaging and transporting metadata for delivery down to the desktop. The
target of such an RSS feed (not necessarily a 'newsfeed' but perhaps more
felicitously termed 'web feed' as per Guardian Unlimited usage :) could be
any app which can read this simple RDF profile.

Cheers,

Tony



> -----Original Message-----
> From: Julian Bond [mailto:julian_bond-/Fkc1E/MbsFWk0Htik3J/[email protected]] 
> Sent: 19 October 2004 08:01
> To: [email protected]
> Subject: Re: [RSS-DEV] Behind the times
> 
> 
> 
> "Hammond, Tony" <T.Hammond-F/0MNWz/[email protected]> wrote:
> >Oh, but I don't understand this. They are AFAICT working completely 
> >_within_ the standard framework - or did I miss something? (I quite 
> >often do.:) Whether a particular app is responsive enough or 
> sensitive 
> >to the data payload within an RSS 1.0 feed is really up to 
> the app. The 
> >principles of RSS 1.0 are very clear. And IMHO much to be welcomed. 
> >Where else can we look for extensibility?
> >
> >The post was only a mild joshing. I only meant to convey the 
> sentiment: 
> >"Job well done!". Seems to me that Guardian Unlimited is 
> _ahead_ of the 
> >times.
> 
> And well done to them.
> 
> But. This issue of using namespaces for extensibility but without 
> support in aggregators is important. There is a sense here in 
> which RDF 
> is "write only data". Yes, you can express more and more semantic 
> concepts in RDF. But if nobody can read it or tries to read it, what 
> have you achieved? Or is it a good thing to load up the file 
> with more 
> and more metadata because somebody, one day, will try and 
> make sense of 
> it and make inferences from it?
> 
> Take this one instance of <dc:subject> used for categories. How many 
> feeds use it? How many aggregators read it and display it? Is any 
> attempt made to standardise the category labels (after 
> del.icio.us maybe 
> this isn't necessary)? Can I turn the base URL and the 
> category and turn 
> it back into a URL for just that category? Even though 
> http://blogs.guardian.co.uk/news/archives/cat_uk_news.html is a 
> logically constructed URL, I don't see it in the RDF.
> 
> My preference would be for http://blogs.guardian.co.uk/news/index.rdf
> http://blogs.guardian.co.uk/news/cat_uk_news/index.rdf
> 
> You could still put in all the dc terms, but that would make 
> it possible 
> for existing aggregators to take single categories.
> 
> -- 
> Julian Bond Email&MSM: julian.bond at voidstar.com
> Webmaster:                 http://www.ecademy.com/
> Personal WebLog:          http://www.voidstar.com/
> M: +44 (0)77 5907 2173      T: +44 (0)192 0412 433
> 
> 
>  
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> 
> 
> 
>  
> 
> 
> 



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