Re: [syndication] Re: Aggregating and displaying feeds

[Julian Bond <julian@netmarketseurope.com>]

In article <A5AB59E902D2D411BAF2009027B11E4CC2EB72@fsjubj05.ssg.gunter.a
f.mil>, dave.cantrell@gunter.af.mil writes
>Of course that would defeat the whole purpose of using the existing
>standards. Still, it seems there are two different models out there for
>these types of items: the standard weblog, where one person
>(<managingEditor>) writes each item (a la Scripting.com); and the
>"community" weblogs like Slashdot, where many people each write one item,
>and one of them may or may not be the <managingEditor> for the channel.

There is of course a third major use. The commercial news site where a
story or feature has an author and probably a sub-editor (and perhaps a
whole hierarchy of researchers, editors and bureaucrats ;-( ).

Much as it would be nice to have an <author> element, it's no good
changing the standard to include it if nobody uses it. For the moment,
we have to work with the feeds as they are. There ought to be an option
to go back to the original page and check the headers, but hardly anyone
puts this data in the headers or actually uses the Dublin Core which is
probably the relevant standard.

>Is there already a standard in place for something like this? I don't want
>to re-hash the thread on the reallySimpleSyndication group (headline
>syndication vs story syndication) but would like to know if a format such as
>RSS 0.91 can actually handle this type of syndication.

A quick scan of the standards suggest that this would have to be
proposed and accepted in 0.93 or it could be encoded as an RDF sub-
element of <item> in 1.0 But even if this happened, you'd have to
persuade the providers of your favourite feeds to add the data.

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