Re: [syndication] RSS feeds for bookmarks

[Mark Nottingham <mnot@mnot.net>]

Interesting. I'm using RSS because I wanted to expose "recently added
bookmarks", so that someone could subscribe and watch for new things
in my bookmarks.

Doing *all* of the bookmarks is a different task, one that is
possible to do in RSS (with categories, etc.), but not as good of a
fit. To me, the primary semantic of RSS is "ordered list" with a few
refinements.

This means that RSS lends itself to temporal lists quite nicely;
effectively, the feed is just a sliding window view of the top of the
list. 

I've been interested in a while of formalising other semantics
besides "top of list" for RSS; for instance; "this is the definitive
list; it isn't a sliding window", etc.

Having these differences expressed in the XML would mean that an
aggregator could figure out how to present the list based on what
kind of list it is; a 'window' list could be stored and added to over
time, while it would know that a 'definitive' list should blow away
anything that was stored previously.



On Sun, Nov 25, 2001 at 11:36:47AM -0500, Morbus Iff wrote:
> >It's sub-optimal because you cannot use metadata, such as
> >category, date, and contact email. Of course, such may not be
> >necessary, and then RSS 0.9x will do just fine. But in many
> >situations you will need the metadata. This means RDF and DC
> >metadata, I suppose. So the issue is really whether it should be
> >RSS 1.0 or some other RDF application.
> 
> There's already an XML format for bookmarks: XBEL.
> http://pyxml.sourceforge.net/topics/xbel/docs/html/xbel.html
> 
> Incidentally, I've been working on a project called Syncasaurus
> that can convert and merge IE/NS/Moz/iCab/XBEL formatted bookmarks
> to each other. Would be no small pickings to do the same with RSS.
> You can see more information about Syncasaurus here:
> 
>   http://www.sourceforge.net/projects/syncasaurus/
> 
> There's a design document in the CVS that outlines the planned
> runtime logic and the purpose of everything. Right now, the project
> is very very early in its infancy - it doesn't really do much right
> now, in other words (although I've been manually trafficking and
> merging my bookmarks amongst three or four computers, and things
> have been working fine).
> 
> -- 
> Morbus Iff ( i am your scary godmother )
> http://www.disobey.com/ && http://www.gamegrene.com/
> please me: http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/wishlist/25USVJDH68554
> icq: 2927491 / aim: akaMorbus / yahoo: morbus_iff / jabber.org: morbus
> 
>  
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> 
> 

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