Re: [syndication] This may look strange

[Aaron Swartz <aswartz@swartzfam.com>]

Dave Winer <dave@userland.com> wrote:

> I use the outliner to write Scripting News. Every other XMLization we use
> loses some of what's already in the content. Here's the new file, it's
> rewritten every time I update Scripting News.

Great! I was going to ask you if you were going to make a file like this --
here it is. I think that outlining might be the direction to go in for
syndication formats -- especially since scriptingNews is choking(1) on your
use of the title attribute.

One question: Will the outlineDocument format support persistent ids? For
example, I'd like to be able to reference portions an outline, without
having to worry about outline items being added on top of it. This could be
easily dealt with by having a unique ID attribute added to the <outline>
tag. Right now the only way to reference an item in an outline is by number,
which would change if anything was added on top of it. Then we could create
psuedo-URLs for outlines:

http://www.scripting.com/xml/currentOutline.xml#aNewXmlization.workingOnSpec

of course they'd probably be automatically generated, so they wouldn't look
so nice.

Here's why persistent IDs are useful for syndication. I'd like to be able to
create separate "news story" in my aggregator for each topic on Scripting
News. I'd like it to be able to know which sub-items in each news story I've
read, and then display me only the new ones. I'd also like it to show me
ones that have been updated. This is real hard when the file keeps changing,
and their are no persistent IDs to keep track of every thing.

Thanks for your leadership in this area,

Aaron

1: Here's what the file looks like:

<b>A new XMLization<a name="aNewXmlization">&nbsp;</a> title="Permanent link
to 'A new XMLization' in archives."><img
src="http://www.scripting.com/images/leftArrow.gif"; height="9" width="11"
border="0"></b>

Any plans to fix this? It looks like the automation that produces the file
is getting screwed up by the extra tags.

-- 
        Aaron Swartz         |"This information is top security.
<http://swartzfam.com/aaron/>|     When you have read it, destroy yourself."
  <http://www.theinfo.org/>  |             - Marshall McLuhan