Re: meta-issue: arbitrary relationships required?

[Danny Ayers <danny.ayers@xxxxxxxxx>]

On Sat, 09 Oct 2004 10:21:14 -0700, Tim Bray <tim.bray@xxxxxxx> wrote:
> 
> On Oct 9, 2004, at 9:30 AM, Danny Ayers wrote:
> > as long as there is still a uniform means of defining
> > arbitrary relationships between Atom resources and other resources.
> 
> Is this a requirement for Atom?

Yes, I believe it is, and most definitely should be.

  I suggest that it's not.  I'd be
> interested in hearing arguments from prior syndication art or from our
> charter. -Tim
 
The charter says:
[[
The format must be able to represent additional information in an
user-extensible manner.
...
The Working Group will also take steps to ensure interoperability, by.
..describing how one migrates from the various RSS versions to the
Atom syndication feed format.
]]

The latter aspect is probably most significant in this discussion. You
can add information to an RSS 1.0 feed featuring arbitrary
relationships (properties). Producers and consumers that support RSS
1.0's model can uniformly interpret that information. A system
migrated to Atom without support of this kind would lose a significant
facility.

Prior syndication art - RSS 1.0 fully supports it, e.g. there's a
WordPress plugin to add terms from FOAF to give more info re. topics,
authors etc:

http://www.wasab.dk/morten/blog/feed/rdf

Nature makes extensive use of the PRISM vocabularies:

http://npg.nature.com/npg/servlet/Content?data=xml/02_newsfeed.xml&style=xml/02_newsfeed.xsl

It's true that most RSS 1.0 producers and consumers only support
enough of RDF to be able to get the data into their application model
(or simply display it). But one thing this shows is that total
commitment to a model isn't needed - really simple tools can still
produce and consume RSS 1.0, despite it being declared to be a
difficult syntax by a lot of people. There are sophisticated RDF tools
around, and their number is growing - all of them support RSS 1.0 out
of the box.

Atom will (hopefully) have a syntax that will be considered simple.
There is no suggestion here that it should support a model like RDF,
just some form of mechanism or convention that will allow it to do a
reasonable proportion of what RSS 1.0 can do.

Cheers,
Danny.





-- 

http://dannyayers.com