Metadata or content - and some OCS feedback

["james@xmlTree.com" <james@xxxxxxx.xxxx]

Thanks, Ian, for the work that you have put in on OCS.  I am, though, a little unclear on
the objectives of the group.  Is it :

a) to define a channel metadata format (when the channel is updated, who the editor is
etc.), or
b) to define the channel content format (news item 1, news item 2 etc.), or
c) to define both separately, or
d) to define both rolled into one.

> BTW, when dealing with the HTML and text versions in the CE Power
> example I used the MIME types as the format entries. Normally the
> format element points to a DTD or Schema for the format, but for
> syndication formats that are essentially designed to be pulled
> straight into a web page I considered text/html and text/plain to be
> adequate. Any thoughts on that?

I think that it is a pity that the <format> element is being used to store two types of
information, making it harder for parsers.  The mime type is probably necessary anyway for
completeness (can we ever consider a scenario where .pdf files are used as one of the
channel formats?)

One solution would be -
<rdf:description about="http://www.windowscepower.com/shares/netscape-
rss/headlines.rdf">
  <ocs:language>en</ocs:language>
  <ocs:content-type>text/xml</ocs:content-type>
  <ocs:schema>http://my.netscape.com/rdf/simple/0.9/</ocs:schema>
  <ocs:updatePeriod>daily</ocs:updatePeriod>
  <ocs:updateFrequency>1</ocs:updateFrequency>
  </rdf:description>

In the case of text/plain, the schema element would be left out.  In the case of
text/html, the schema could be the dtd for the version of html used.

Best regards,
James Carlyle

james@xmltree.com
www.xmltree.com - directory of XML content on the web