RE: [syndication] RSS suitable for date/time relative material ?

["Rael Dornfest" <rael@oreilly.com>]

Howdy,

RSS is perfect for your purposes.  Unfortunately you're right, 0.9x do not
currently have a per-item date/time element.  It's exactly the problems
you're encountering (overloading existing title or description elements)
that led to RSS 1.0's modular extensibility.

RSS 1.0[1] allows you to either supply such information using one of the
existing modules (Dublin Core[2] seems apropos) or via your own ad hoc
modular extension.

You could:

  a) Use the Dublin Core "date" element to represent the date
     of publication or broadcast; there's no restriction against
     this date being in the future[3].

     <dc:date>2001-01-01T12:00+00:00</dc:date>

     (That's January 1st, 2001 at 12:00 noon GMT.)

or

  b) Create your own ad-hoc extension(s), something like this:

     <broadcast:date>2001-01-01</broadcast:date>
     <broadcast:time>12:00</broadcast:time>

     if that suits you better.

     The "broadcast" prefix would be associated with a URI representing
     a namespace for this modular extension thusly:

     xmlns:broadcast="http://me.org/rss/mod_broadcast";

Of course it'd probably be far more useful to make use of a more standard
extension whenever possible so as to aid interoperability with those
applications not specifically designed to make use of your ad hoc
extensions.  Any RSS application understanding and using dc:date would have
no trouble with a) above.

As an aside, Dave Winer has asked before (can't quite remember where,
unfortunately) whether or not 0.92[4] should include a date/time element at
the item level; I'd say so -- I keep seeing it popping up in postings like
this one and it would also perhaps work nicely with the <enclosure> element
so as to allow enclosures to be scheduled for some time in the future while
the URL is already known.

Regards,

Rael

[1] http://purl.org/rss/1.0/
[2] http://purl.org/rss/1.0/modules/dc/
[3] "A date associated with an event in the life cycle of the resource"
    http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/
[4] http://backend.userland.com/rss092

--

> From: Simon Fell [mailto:soap@zaks.demon.co.uk]

> I've been looking at RSS to see if its suitable for syndicating
> information about time relative content, i.e. Live audio/video webcast
> streams. There doesn't appear to be any structured way to include the
> date/time info, which has lead me in the direction of putting the
> date/times in the <title> and then either each night generating a new
> list of what's coming up tomorrow, or adding items a few hours before
> they start.
> A few questions
> 1. Is RSS the best approach for this, is there some other standard
> that would suit it better ?
> 2.Is my assumption on handling date/times in RSS correct ?