Web Feeds
Web feeds could be so much more if we put some effort into them. This post explores some ideas of how to start.
Rob Sayre points out that this blog still doesn’t show a preference for Atom, embarrassingly enough.
Huh. The Atom Format RFC has been out for a while, and as one of the authors, I get the odd mail now and again asking a question or just saying “thanks.”
Feed Paging and Archiving (nee Feed History) has finally made it to a standards-track RFC.
See if your aggregator can subscribe to this feed (username/password: test/test) and post the results in comments.
Over the weekend, I submitted a new draft of Feed History.
About two years ago, I got a little grouchy about those little orange XML buttons, and exhorted people to label them properly with RSS.
The RSS Tutorial for Content Publishers and Webmasters has been translated to Brazilian Portuguese, thanks to the efforts of Maurício Samy Silva.
Another year has gone by, and rather than cataloguing music, movies or books that I liked, here are some feeds on the Web that I enjoyed reading throughout the year. I’ll avoid repeating the obvious news, technical and blogroll feeds.
Atom has finally realised its most important advantage over the various flavours of RSS — it’s a Standards-Track RFC.
Does anybody know of a program or service that will look at a calendar file (e.g., vCalendar, iCalendar, hCalendar) and publish the entries on it as an RSS feed, where each entry in the feed has a link to that one calendar entry?
Feed History draft -04 is out, with the only major change being the replacement of fh:stateful with fh:incremental, with corresponding changes throughout the document, to make the concepts a bit clearer.
I took a pass at a revision of the RSS Tutorial for Content Publishers and Webmasters on the train this morning, as I realised it was dreadfully out of date.
I’ve had a few e-mails asking how I got this site’s RSS feed to include its history, so here are the instructions for doing it in Moveable Type (the software that I use to manage this site). If you have instructions for other feed-generating software, please either leave them in comments below, or send me an e-mail.
Draft -03 of Feed History: Enabling Stateful Syndication is now available. Significant changes include:
After more than five years, syndication is maturing rapidly. It’s being used for more than blogging — whether it be stock quotes, system logs, or order lists — and even blogging will change in nature as it gets more popular; people will be using blogs to fundamentally change the way they do business, inside and outside the firewall.
It’s been covered before elsewhere, but just a friendly reminder: ‘feed’ URIs are bad for the Web, as are any that are used solely for dispatch (e.g., ‘itms’, ‘ pcast’).
Should cookies be shared between your RSS aggregator and your Web browser? If they were, sites would be able to automatically personalise the feeds you subscribe to; would people be interested in that, or see it as an intrusion in their privacy?
Way back when I put the first Atom drafts together, I included a placeholder for a section that I hoped would allow reconstruction of feed state. Presently, this often isn’t necessary, because you have to be away for a seriously long time (e.g, on vacation) before you actually miss anything. However, I’d put forth that this state of grace is going to be increasingly unlikely.
Melbourne’s The Age now has RSS feeds available — hooray! I’ve been scraping them and bugging the staff for a while, so it’s nice to see that Fairfax (now “Fairfax Digital” instead of “f2”… whatever) finally get it.
A few people got together in NYC to talk about Atom going to the W3C this morning. One part of the minutes of this discussion raised my eyebrows a fair amount;
In an otherwise excellent article, Jon Udell blames the lack of one-click subscribe in syndication formats on lack of vision;
This just popped up on the iTunes “new releases” list. I think we’re going to see some Atom-related products called “Tomato.”
One of the problems facing the syndication community as a whole is the number of formats that have been minted. This a particular concern for Atom as the newcomer; a common argument against it is that RSS content will never go away, so it’s just adding to this problem.
It’s like having a “get your ASCII here” button; completely meaningless.
This is the way syndication should be; user-customisable and aligned with the Web view of the resources it talks about. Cool.
As you may know, I’m editing the Atom format draft in my copious spare time, but not actively participating in the community (I am watching, but I don’t have the time to really dig in).
Tim Bray’s latest missive contains a passage about offline RSS;
Jeremy Allaire is writing about something he calls RSS-Data, and I must say it touches on a lot of interesting points. A few;
Tim Bray wonders what the difference between an RSS feed delivered via HTTP and an e-mail folder (e.g., via IMAP) is; I’ve wondered the same thing myself. As far as I can tell;
Somehow, I’ve been drafted into editing the Atom syntax specification, and have just thrown up a first draft.
RSSJobs looks interesting; hopefully, we’ll see more of these “non-traditional” uses of RSS as time goes by.
Mark Pilgrim is starting to think about issues surrounding the transport, transfer and general moving around of the Format Formerly Known as Echo (nee Pie).
Back when we were exploring the possibity of a profile of RSS, I set up a wiki on the topic and promptly let it run wild, to see what would happen.
Dave Winer has announced a few changes to RSS, which seem positive at first glance, but need a little closer inspection.
This is exactly what namespaces are for.
Sam Ruby suggests a roadmap for a new effort that may very well replace RSS.
Mark Baker responded to my thoughts on RSS history a while back, and I’m finally getting around to responding (nothing like a hotel lobby to clear your thoughts…).
Sam Ruby has announced a Wiki about what a weblog entry is.
I’m surprised by Dave Winer’s continuing reluctance to identify RSS 2.0 with a namespace, given how strongly he feels about interoperability and respecting format definitions.
Tim Bray is looking for an RSS soundbite, what some people would call an elevator pitch, I suppose (aren’t they supposed to be level? Never mind).
Dave Winer argues that RSS implementers should toe the line:
Tim Bray thinks out loud about mechanisms to allow RSS subscribers to be counted. His poison of choice is adding a query components to the URI in the Referrer header.
Don wants to send RSS to OASIS, of all places. Doesn’t that mean it’ll have to be corporations standardizing it? Urgh.
Don, Sam, Ben, Mena and others have started blogging about a profile of RSS.
Excellent. Danny Ayers proposes a
Simple Semantic Resolution RSS 2.0 Module.
I’m setting up a weblog for a fairly well-known colleague, and doing some traffic estimates to try to size his server.
Sam mentions dc:date; that’s what I was thinking, except that ‘date’ on its own is pretty useless. As Bill points out, dcterms gives you different date semantics.
[I tried to post this as a comment on Sam’s blog, but I think there may still be transitional issues over there… ]
For discussion: RSS history module (the eventual result of this).
Sam proposes some changes to RSS 2.0 regarding namespaces. My first question was, “why?” but upon reading his next post, I get it.
Tim says that RSS Needs Fixing. Right on! Some people are intereted in endless tinkering with RSS - I’m not. I’m interested in putting it on everybody’s desktop, and making it transparent to them. This means we need better interop.
RSS.py has been revved; fixed some problems with addItem (now takes an index argument to say where to add the item; default is first - used to be last), and a few other tweaks.
Don’s worried about the glaciating influences of having a stable spec for RSS 2.0. I couldn’t disagree more.
RSS needs a bit of stablity (as I’ve often said), so I’ve gotten off of my duff and done something about it.
Jorgen hits a subject that’s of great interest to me; RSS standardization. I originally started the Syndication list to get RSS moving towards some sort of
recognized standard; more recently, my effort to register an RSS media type was stalled by the lack of a stable spec published by a recognized group.
Wouldn’t it be great if The Royal Society, the Commonwealth Club and your local council all had RSS feeds available, conspiquous and up-to-date?
Almost forgot - today I put an exploration of the semantics of RSS:Channel out there for comment. I’ve been thinking about various aspects of this for a while; not sure how far I’ve gotten, but I think it’s important to nail this down if we want to move RSS forward.
RSS: XHTML Profile, to me, is another proof that syntax isn’t important, as long as you can boil whatever you get down to a format you know. Nice job!
I see Dave is once again rev’ing RSS. I have reservations about the some of the new mechanisms (e.g., shoe-horning MIME into XML is a horrible idea) but I’m encouraged by hints that using XML Namespaces is being considered. IMHO the smart thing for Dave to do would be to start a version of “Minimal RSS”; maybe 0.95, that is just the very, very core markup (say, title, link and description, maybe one or two others for channel metadata) and put EVERYTHING else in modules (coordinating the release of them with the spec). This would produce a very stable core spec that would allow him to experiment with new facilities with impunity, whilst strengthening 0.9x’s position; my impression is that most people use 1.0 because of Namepaces, not RDF.
Interesting; I’m glad thiswas written, because RDF is good stuff, and this is a good walkthrough.
Harumph. Date is a datatype, not a property.