Re: channel classification (was: Hello, I am Carmen)

["Mark Nottingham" <mnot@xxxxx.xxxx]

So the actual categories that the publisher can choose from, how does that
get decided? I don't think it's a good idea to allow channel publishers to
create new categories; that would be a mess. A centrally-managed list would
be idea, but probably impractical - do we want to give this a try?

Maybe another way to go about it is to allow the publisher to decide which
classification system they want to be considered part of. For instance:

<FooFormat>
<header>
...
<category
authority="http://bar.com/categorydefinition.xml";>Widgets/FrobNobs</category
>
...
</header>
<item>
...

This is nice and flexible, but may lead to problems; if an aggregator didn't
want to support too many categorization methods, or there was a lot of
overlap between categorisation schemes, there would be trouble.

Hopefully, selecting the channel from a large list at the aggregator will be
only one method of adding channels. Netscape had the right approach in
allowing channel publishers to put a 'subscribe to our channel' button on
their home page; the problem here of course is that the aggregator could
(and should) be anywhere. A simple cut-n-paste URL for the XML file will
probably have to suffice for this...