Re: [syndication] Re: Finding Feeds

[Mark Nottingham <mnot@mnot.net>]

On Tue, Oct 02, 2001 at 11:48:11PM -0000, Bill Kearney wrote:
> > > Now this is an interesting idea.  Are you saying that when
> > > viewing a web page that's also available 'somewhere' in
> > > syndicated format that you want your browser to pick up on that
> > > and tell you?  Now, THAT would be slick.  It would really
> > > 'complete the circuit' from fed items to their website and back
> > > again.
> > 
> > That's what I'd like to see; see the "Linking to channel lists"
> > proposal in [1. I think the on-page link is an intermediate step,
> > until browsers support indicating a feed is there in the UI natively
> > (know any mozilla coders?).
> 
> You sort of missed my point, I think, but we agree on desiring a way 
> for a browser to find a feed.

Cool.


> My point here was being able to find THIS ONE ITEM in a feed.  
> Presuming you're viewing a single item then the meta-data would 
> indicate where to find this ONE item in a feed.  If you were looking 
> at a number of items, a la Slashdot's opening screen, then you'd most 
> likely want the entire feed (or just the currently view scope).

I am missing your point ;)  Couldn't a particular item be identified
by the tuple of the feed URI and the item URI, like

 ( "http://example.com/feed.rss";, "http://example.com/item5.html";)

? This might be serialised in the HTML for the page something like

  <link rel="rss-feed" href="http://www.example.com/feed.rss";>
  <link rel="rss-item" href="http://example.com/item5.html";>

so you could the find the rss-item in the rss-feed.

Or is it a matter of just putting IDREFs in the RSS, like

<item id="5">
  ...
</item>

and then linking to http://example.com/feed.rss#5
(yeah, yeah, this should be XPointer, but the idea is there)

If you identify by URI, it's guaranteed unique, except that if you
have multiple items referring to the same URI in the feed, they'll
'overwrite' each other. If you use IDREFs, it's unique within the
*current* view of the feed, but not outside of it (unless the server
guarantees them to be unique over time, like an ETag in HTTP).

> The missing link in my idea is that feeds don't generally support the 
> idea of one item being located this way.  Take it one step further 
> and give me a way to grab the XML data for the item instead of the 
> HTML presentation.

Can you give a real-world example of how you'd want to use this? I
might be confusing a few different threads here...


-- 
Mark Nottingham
http://www.mnot.net/