Re: [syndication] site-wide metadata discovery

["Bill Kearney" <wkearney@syndic8.com>]

I'd favor using a single directive inside robots that pointed to an external
document that had all of what you're suggesting.

The issues of breaking existing robots.txt parsers and running afoul of size
restrictions, not to mention the inevitable technical arguments about "polluting
the purity of robots.txt"

And one unexpectly nice side effect:

User-agent: *
Disallow: /stupidFixedName.url

We're trying to get a foothold into letting existing sites with lots of content
that are now bringing lots of RSS online share that index with us.  Let's not go
overboard and freak them out entirely.

But yes, the ideas you're suggesting regarding subscriptions and lists are
useful.

What might be useful would be to have a range of 'known list types' be
established.

http://whatever.example.com/fdml/1.0#subscriptions
http://whatever.example.com/fdml/1.0#site-list
http://whatever.example.com/fdml/1.0#users

Etc...  (these are just examples, not valid URI)

This would let them be used in a number of different contexts as a way to give
meaning (semantics) to the data.  Seeing this applied to a list would mean it's
a list of those things.  The spec's definitions of those things would be the
explain just what's being asserted.

-Bill Kearney

----- Original Message -----
From: "Chad Everett" <yahoogroups@jayseae.cxliv.org>
To: <syndication@yahoogroups.com>
Sent: Thursday, October 16, 2003 10:39 AM
Subject: RE: [syndication] site-wide metadata discovery


> Sorry, my mind is wandering a bit further down this path.  These are perhaps
> premature questions, as if we can't do anything with robots.txt, they are
> irrelevant.  But my mind's wandering anyway.  :)
>
> So... If this is something usable, I wonder if it could be used for more
> than this one discovery?  If yes, what would the best way to be to go about
> it?  Would something like this work/be interesting/be useful?
>
> Public-Feeds: myPublicFeeds.opml
> Format: http://www.opml.org/spec
> Title: Public Feed List
>
> Public-Feeds: feedindex.xml
> Format: http://purl.org/ocs/directory/0.5/
> Title: Public Feed List
>
> Subscriptions: mySubscriptions.opml
> Format: http://www.opml.org/spec
> Title: My Subscriptions
>
> This might make it a bit easier (and clearer) to add attributes to
> individual offerings, rather than trying to cram them all onto one line.
> It's been mentioned a few times that this is a Bad Thing with OPML, so why
> perpetuate that here if it's a feature that isn't desired?
>
> It could also allow for multiple instances of the same data in different
> formats.
>
> Or would something like this be better:
>
> Site-Index: default
> Public-Feeds: myPublicFeeds.opml
> Public-Feeds-Format: http://www.opml.org/spec
> Public-Feeds-Title: Public Feed List
> Public-Feeds: feedindex.xml
> Public-Feeds-Format: http://purl.org/ocs/directory/0.5/
> Public-Feeds-Title: Public Feed List
> Subscriptions: mySubscriptions.opml
> Subscriptions-Format: http://www.opml.org/spec
> Subscriptions-Title: My Subscriptions
>
> I think this might have more problems processing multiple formats, since
> there is no clearly defined delimiter in between similar entries.  I also
> think it looks a lot less clean than the other method.