Re: [syndication] Is a Feed the right place for your Data?

[Rick Bradley <roundeye@roundeye.net>]

* Danny Ayers (danny666@virgilio.it) [031107 08:24]:
> It obviously can be done, but the question is whether or not this is the
> best approach to delivering the content. Correct me if I'm wrong, but to
> access this data it will be necessary to load a page containing the
> white-on-orange buttons into a (presumably HTML) browser, get the links from
> there and copy them into an RSS reader. I that the per-item metadata (title,
> date) has been stripped, so the channel is reduced to something comparable
> to a HTML list. So why not have this static content as HTML, linked directly
> from the original HTML page? Where do you see the advantage in the RSS-ish
> approach?

I'll probably keep pushing this notion wherever it comes up (so forgive
me if you've seen this before), but these syndication formats make good
encapsulation formats, but they start to seem cumbersome because we only
think about content that is tied down to an URL.  If the (micro)content
isn't tied down having microfeeds like these starts to make more sense:
give each chunk of content an URN that globally identifies it,
encapsulate it in a good syndication format, and drop it into a network
that can return content by URN alone (where the URN doesn't depend on
DNS for locating a resource).  I feel like BitTorrent is a starting
point for such a network -- though probably the URN scheme would need to
be changed.

When we're talking about syndication I think it's ironic that everything
syndicated is pegged down to somebody's web server and subject to the
problems of DNS, bandwidth, and personal whim.  Truly syndicate the
content and we'll have something worth getting worked up about.

Rick
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