Compromise time....

[Jeremy Zawodny <jeremy@zawodny.com>]

Okay, after looking over the past few days worth of discussion, it's
clear that there are a few points of contention.  And I don't see a
way of convincing either side to change their position.  I'd like to
enumerate the big ones and propose a compromise:

  1. Having a well-known fall-back URL, such as http://blah.com/feeds.xml

  2. Using OPML to represent the feed list.

I now agree that #1 is not worth it.  HOWEVER, I would like to pursue
the possible use of robots.txt as suggested by Chad.  Does anyone here
know any robots.txt "experts"--people who were involved with the
discussions back then?  We should try to get an authoritative answer
on whether it is (1) possible to do what we want there, and (2) not
completely unreasonable to do it.  If the robots.txt option doesn't
work out, then it doesn't work out.  We tried.

Does anyone disagree with that?

As for #2, I'd like to see if we can't come up with a format that will
serve our needs without also tying our hands a year from now.  (Or at
least several formats from which we can choose a one.)  I don't think
OPML is it.  I've heard arguments both ways, but there seems to be a
lot to gain by using a format designed for this purpose that's also
plays well with XSLT and friends.  We should also have a validator for
the format.  I wasn't able to find one for OPML and after comparing
the OPML produced by a few blogging tools, I understand why.  My
initial proposal a month or so ago used OPML because I misunderstood
OPML.  The fact that many tools produced and consumed it provided me
with a false sense of its standardization.

Some of the other formats seem like they're solving related problems
but I'm not (yet?) convinced they'll do what we need (or what I think
we need).  I need to look at them a bit more.

Using the list of required data that's there now, I hope to put a
simple example file (as a proposal) on the Wiki later tonight if I
have the time.  Might others do the same?  And maybe ping the list
when there's a new one to see?

I suspect that putting a simple example file together will help me
better understand what we're creating.  I wonder if the same might not
be true for others? 

Jeremy
-- 
Jeremy D. Zawodny     |  Perl, Web, MySQL, Linux Magazine, Yahoo!
<Jeremy@Zawodny.com>  |  http://jeremy.zawodny.com/