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Re: OpenSearch RSS


Thomas Broyer wrote:

Tim Bray wrote:


Check out A9's OpenSearch at http://opensearch.a9.com/ - I'm starting to hear substantial buzz around this thing.

I wonder, is embedding the OpenSearch RSS stuff in Atom going to cause any heartburn? I'm inclined to think not, but would appreciate others having a look.

I get the feeling that OpenSearch + Atom could be real useful. -Tim 


   * I set type="text/html" on the feed's alternate link, because the
     OpenSearch RSS 1.0 Specification [1] says the RSS <link> is "a URL
     that can recreate the search in HTML format", @type is not used in
     entries as it might not be text/html
   * I changed the escaped-HTML &amp;copy; to &#169;, it saves us an
     internal DTD subset while allowing us to use type="text"
   * Atom mandates an atom:author, I added a dummy one
   * Atom mandates an atom:updated in the feed, I added a dummy one; it
     should be set to the latest atom:updated date found in the feed's
     entries, or at least to the date the request was made.
   * Atom mandates an atom:updated in each entry, I added a dummy one;
     it should be set to the last access of the search engine to the
     "result document", or eventually the date the request was made.
     For example, Google is able to give you this date if it has cached
     the document (when you look at a cached page, Google puts a "this
     is Google's cache of <URI> as retrieved on <DATE>" on top of the page.
   * I used the address of the "result document" (permalink?) as the
     atom:id of each entry, because this is the easiest way to do it...

I did the same experiment; bottom line Amazon will need to add

 -atom:updated
 -atom:id
 -atom:modified
 -a few attributes

to use Atom. They also need to fix their example*, it's invalid XML (&copy; in the last entry). By the looks of things, with the feed level extensions, they're going the route Nature have taken with RSS1.0.

cheers
Bill

* http://opensearch.a9.com/spec/opensearchrss/1.0/