Re: meta-issue: arbitrary relationships required?

[Danny Ayers <danny.ayers@xxxxxxxxx>]

On Sat, 09 Oct 2004 15:10:37 -0400, Robert Sayre <mint@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> Danny Ayers wrote:
> 
> > 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.
> >
> 
> The kicker here is that consumers don't support RSS1.0's model because
> it isn't helpful. The tricky part of supporting an extension is writing
> the handler.

Several syndication-oriented consumers do support RSS 1.0's model, and
all RDF tools (that support the standard interchange format) support
RSS 1.0. There are lots of them (see 
http://www.ilrt.bris.ac.uk/discovery/rdf/resources/#sec-tools).

The model can be extremely useful, especially when you want to mix
data from different domains. Urchin is a pretty good example:
http://urchin.sourceforge.net/docs/Design.html

Matt Biddulph has some good RSS+FOAF material:
http://www.hackdiary.com/archives/000020.html
http://www.hackdiary.com/projects/chumpologica/

> Show me an example of a client doing something useful with the
> extensions in those two feeds. 

Ok, try BrownSauce - it's not exactly a wonderful visualization (it's
designed for displaying completely arbitrary data), but it'll do for
demonstration purpose. Links below.

One of the displayed lines from the rss:item in the Nature feed is:
Source: Nature 431, 613 (2004)

Part of the display of the rss:item from Morten's feed is:
# topic:
    * RSS
    * Title: RSS
    * page: RSS

Then, tell me why it would be impossible
> or harder in Atom.

The displays are based on a interpretation of the data based on the
semantics encoded in RDF/XML, specifically how a relationship defined
in an external namespace is associated between a resource in the RSS
feed and other data/resources. Atom has no such mechanism. The tool is
rendering the data consistently across all (unknown) relationships,
potentially expressed in different syntax styles, but following the
rules of RSS 1.0. Can't be done in Atom.

I know it's not exactly a mindblowing display, I'll see what I can
find with a bit more glitz. (Using the chumpalogica to aggregate from
the feeds and then doing a FOAF-based query on the data in Redland
might be nice...) But it does what you asked.

<rambling-opinion>
There seems to be a tendency around these parts to take a very narrow
view of what a tool that uses syndication formats should be like. This
being based on the implementations that have appeared in the last year
or so - ok, not too surprising considering desktop aggregators have
only been around for maybe 3 years.  But all due respect to their
developers, but the current versions of BlogLines and RssBandit might
be very useful but they aren't the end of the story, they're the
beginning.

Kind of reminds me of when, years back, my mother got herself an
Amstrad Word Processor. Took me ages to convince her it was a
computer.
</rambling-opinion>

Cheers,
Danny.

-- 

http://dannyayers.com