Re: [syndication] Robot Discovery

[burton@relativity.yi.org]

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Julian Bond <julian_bond@voidstar.com> writes:

> This is not thought through but bear with me. It's a response to one of the
> ideas floating round here about a consistent way to discover if a site
> publishes RSS. As we were talking about this it occurred to me that this
> problem is not limited to RSS. A site might well have many XML based files
> available.

Not specific to RSS but limited to content syndication I think...  

> It might also publish many XML based web services. At the moment, the emphasis
> is all on aggregators and indexers trying to locate these and the builders to
> promote them. Perhaps a standard way for builders to publish their existence
> would turn this on it's head.

:)

> Imagine a discovery.xml somewhat similar to a robots.txt. This would be
> a single file in the root of the website that listed all the xml
> available at that site.

There are scalability issues with one file on the root of the website.
Specifically because you might want to have "regions" of this website managed by
different people/organizations.

Instead I could see an "directory.xml" located anywhere within the hierarchy.

> Each entry would consist of a single parameter, being the URL of the xml
> service, or the URL of a deeper list.

??  Why wouldn't it be similar to OCS?

> A spider
> reading this would then have to look at each one to determine it's type
> and perhaps use that to go off and look further. So we might have:- 
> discovery.xml => mainnews.rss
>               => subscriptions.opml
>               => sitemeta.dc
>               => feedlist.ocs => subcategory.rss
>               => servicelist.wsdl => getstockquote

OCS/XCS can support this.  We just need the discovery portion.

> Now like all standards, for this to work it would need very widespread
> implementation. I suspect there are plenty (ie >1) of potential formats
> already available. I can also see problems where the individual entries are
> not single files, but cgi with multiple parameters.

I don't think CGIs would be supported.  How would you introspect the parameters?

> Is this something new? Or am I just re-hashing work that's already under way?

Yes... I have patent on it :).. syche...

Kevin

- -- 
Kevin A. Burton ( burton@apache.org, burton@openprivacy.org, burtonator@acm.org )
        Cell: 415-595-9965 URL: http://relativity.yi.org ICQ: 73488596 

Captain, the salvaged node has not maintained synaptic cohesion within the
cortical transplant!
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