Borgcasting, 1998

A little holiday reading...

I just stumbled on some Jan 1998 MSDN material that's pretty
interesting, particularly in relation to Podcasting. It's a tutorial
on Microsoft's Channel Definition Format (CDF), which I suppose was
RSS before it caught the public's imagination...

CDF features scheduling elements, not dissimilar to the update
frequency bits in RSS, not particularly interesting in themselves. But
there's also something similar to the trick of pre-loading of images
in HTML (to help with fancy Javascript). Combined with appropriate
scheduling, this can do the delayed-download side of Podcasting.
Here's how the tutorial describes this "pre-caching":

[[
Pre-caching (USAGE VALUE="None")

USAGE VALUE="None" allows the developer to specify items in addition
to HTML pages and images to be downloaded to the user's cache. These
items are thus pre-cached and made available offline. For example, you
may pre-cache sound files by specifying:

  <ITEM HREF="http://yourdomain.com/sound.wav">
    <USAGE VALUE="NONE"></USAGE>
  </ITEM>

You may also pre-cache multiple items by setting a sub-channel's
<USAGE> to none, and then specifying child items for it, as follows:

  <CHANNEL>
    <USAGE VALUE="NONE">
      <ITEM HREF=http://yourdomain.com/sound1.wav PRECACHE="Yes">
      <ITEM HREF=http://yourdomain.com/sound2.wav PRECACHE="Yes">
      <ITEM HREF=http://yourdomain.com/sound3.wav PRECACHE="Yes">
    </USAGE>
  </CHANNEL>
]]
from
http://msdn.microsoft.com/archive/default.asp?url=/archive/en-us/dnarcontent/html/cdf2.asp

Looks like there are quite a few good ideas around here that have
pretty much been forgotten about in the last 7 years, at least in the
context of syndication (mmm...crawling...)

See also: "Firefox Live Bookmarks == IE CDF"
http://www.docuverse.com/blog/donpark/EntryViewPage.aspx?guid=876ebfe3-93dc-426e-940c-85ff75f163de

Cheers,
Danny.

 
-- 

http://dannyayers.com


 
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