Is there a way to abolish this requirement?

Is the <scriptingNews> 2.0b1 format, which supports multiple links per item, going to go away?

Why not hook this with WAP?..Let me explain why I am asking...in the next few months we are going to see a expontential leap in non PC device access to internet from phones and palm pilots and other devices..most of these are enable to view web through the WAP protocol..

Now I realize I am talking about different layers here but I d o see specific hooks within the RSS 0.91 that could be used to hook into the WAP Layer..for example we need the alt to image for channel so that non graphic devices can still display something..

Obviously we could use a specific render in Frontier to break up the xml produced into smaller WAP chunks for non PC delivery rather having to resort to a Gateway solution....

I know more when I dive into both specs over the weekend ..just my thinking outloud..off to digg...

 <link>http://news/article.html </link>
 <alt-link dc:format="text/vnd.wap.wml">http://news/article.wml </alt-link>
 <alt-link dc:description="Discussion">http://news/article_forum.html </alt-link>

Eugene

One advantage <scriptingNews> has over RSS 0.91 is the idea of items that have NO link. For example, the RSS version of Scripting News is pretty useless, because Dave writes a lot of paragraphs that are narrative, rather than being "news" items with a link.

I hadn't thought of that one; I just pulled the most recent Scripting News page, looked at the RSS file, and then highlighted the paragraphs that don't appear in the RSS version.

There are two highlight colors: yellow, which means that the item doesn't appear at all in the RSS file, and green, which means that the item contains more than one link, and since RSS only supports one link per item, the RSS version isn't an exact representation of the actual version.

Here's the highlighted version of SN:

Themes Last night Themes shipped! Yay Brent. All the pointers are on inessential.com, Brent's weblog. Limits on Microsoft's power I'm writing this morning, I want to propose that Microsoft put a settlement offer on the table. I don't want to see the draconian punishment prescribed by Jackson imposed on Microsoft and the software industry. It's not fair, and it would be too disruptive. On the other hand, Microsoft continues to be in denial of the legitimacy of the judgment. There must be limits on their power. If they won't self-impose limits, it totally makes sense for the government to set them. Imho, the Jackson decision is a signal to settle. I've read all the editorials linked below, but I haven't read any editorials that represent the point of view of the Web. That's what I propose to add to the mix. What the Web Wants DaveNet: What the Web Wants. BTW, this piece will not go out via email. If you know someone who reads DaveNet via email, please send them a pointer. It's an important piece, imho, but I no longer wish to distribute essays via email. I want to be able to edit as the day goes by, as I do with Scripting News, because I expect to learn a lot as people read it. I want DaveNet to become a way for me to write whitepapers that have more lasting value. FAQ Mike Seaman: "Do you really believe that it is possible to create a viable business (BrowserCo) as you described it? Where would it get its revenue from, given that people are used to getting their browser for free and are (it seems to me) pretty unlikely to be willing to start paying?" Answer: They would be free to go anywhere they want. Think about a browser tightly integrated with Linux, intelligently, thoughtfully, around a vision of the Two Way Web. They could also compete with Yahoo, who desperately needs competition. Microsoft pointers Cameron Barrett: A World Without Microsoft. WSJ: Microsoft damaged its own credibility in court. MacWEEK has an excellent collection of links on Microsoft. NY Times editorial: "Judge Jackson sided completely with the government in part because he mistrusts the company." Washington Post editorial: "Judge Jackson has alleviated the time problem somewhat by imposing interim restrictions on Microsoft's business practices. Microsoft has asked that these be stayed, but they should not be. They should go into effect to provide the public with protection from Microsoft misconduct while the appeals are pending." Dan Gillmor: "Microsoft and its leaders continue to operate in state of denial. Perhaps they'll turn out to be correct, that the antitrust laws don't apply to what they do. That would be a fearsome finding for competition in the Internet Age, and I find it difficult to believe the higher courts will make such a ruling once they fully understand what's at issue here." Bruce Ramsay: "McKenzie argues that the browser battle was a sideshow, and that the main battle was over their own turf, the server market. The rivals' aim was to neuter Microsoft, making a hard-driving warrior into a tea-and-crumpets competitor." SF Chronicle editorial: "Guessing the future is tricky business, a hard challenge for any federal judge to take on in Microsoft's case. Yet that is precisely what federal regulators are asking in this case. Careful thought about the future is missing from the legal equation in drawing up new ground rules." WSJ: Dividing Microsoft in two isn't just simple arithmetic. Links Jason Levine highlights the portions of Scripting News that don't appear in the RSSization of Scripting News. News.Com: "International financier George Soros today said the Russian Internet is a hot investment and he would consider again investing in the country where he made what he called the worst bet of his career." Surprise: "In Europe there are no blocks, we simply don't think in blocks. We explain which streets to take and the streets have names, which I don't always remember, but I know how to get there: I remember specific buildings, shops, an old church , a nice little bakery where you can smell the fresh bread from a distance, that is how I find my way through the cities." Wired: NSI's Webjacking Epidemic. "After several days of wrangling with Network Solutions and Open SRS -- the Canadian registrar to which the stolen domains were transferred -- Meckler has his domains back, but not his confidence in Network Solutions." Dale Dougherty: Frontier a la Neuberg. "His writing is very accessible to the non-programmer -- he really believes that anyone can learn to program, and a scripting language should make it even easier. Some of this can be explained by the combintation of Matt's interests in the classics and computing, which makes him a kindred spirit of quite a few editors at O'Reilly, including Tim." Check this out: http://www.spellchecker.net/. Andrea has discovered the magic flow-building properties of Wiener Schnitzel.

...The Netscape spec didn't say anything about graphic types, but it's clear that the graphics must flow through an HTML <img> tag, so basically the list of supported types must be types that can appear in an <img>.

It would be better to support images like the HTML 4.0 <OBJECT > tag allows. Why? The OBJECT tag is not an empty tag like IMG is. It allows the client to choose from graphic formats it supports; it degrades gracefully. One can specify the MIME type as a tag attribute, thus allowing client-side rejection without first querying the server. Plus, it is going to be in the XHTML standard.

This is the one thing I really dislike about <scriptingNews>. It seems totally illogical to me to be posting a news item for web syndication that has no link in it.

I can see that places like Scripting News would want to be able to post "comments" and marginalia on the site but that sort of content wouldn't really appeal to anyone getting a syndicated version of the site would it?

If the lastBuildDate was required then you wouldn't need to actually parse the rest of the file to determine if the content was new. Its a minor point when you are parsing a single file but for a system that parses 100+ files on a regualr basis this is a huge time savings.

Consider it a comment on a future version then. :-)

/jason

...The Netscape spec didn't say anything about graphic types, but it's clear that the graphics must flow through an HTML <img> tag, so basically the list of supported types must be types that can appear in an <img>.

Ahhh, thank you!

Lantz

While I am strongly in favor of moving authors towards using the <html:object> element, trying to change the <rss:image> is not a very safe or stable approach.

It would be very nice to add one , optional (and experimental) <rss:channellogo> element which in addition to it's desired information attributes contains one <rss:logoobjectnest> element that envelopes an <html:object> ,with the definition of <html:object> in the namespace and dtd where it belongs at w3. I will see if I can generate the element dtd fragment for this discussion.

Clients of rss could then easily just stick with <rss:image> ( now sporting PNG! ) while the adventures with multiple namespaces and working xhtml clients continues.

Lantz

I am in the camp that prefers a little more semantic content in the element names. How about an optional element &ls;SimpleReview>.

1) Ordering method

2) Categorisation

Ordering method ------------

RSS defines a list of items, or more specifically an ordered sequence. But what is the ordering criteria?

Weblogs and news are ordered by time. Most current RSS channels fall into this category.

Top 10 lists are ordered by a popularity measure. Some examples might be "Lettermans top 10 reasons for ...", "Top selling CDs", "most popular pages". There are a sprinkling of these channels.

Other lists are ordered by degree of match. For example the results of a search might be presented in this manner.

To allow the encoding of this data, I propose the following:

<ordering>time</ordering> Other values: none, top, match

A simple example. I gather several RSS streams about computer books. Using this new <ordering> item, I can automatically distinguish "top books" from "new books". I can merge multiple "new books" streams together, removing duplicates. On the other hand, I can merge merge "top books" streams together, weighting elements by duplication and order within each stream.

Categorisation -----------

Content aggregators need to be able to categorise their content, or risk providing extremely long lists of channels (like userland's :-( ). How is a new user meant to select from a list of 2500 channels, presented as a flat list?

Unfortunately categorisation is EXTREMELY hard to do across a broad range of subjects, in a way that suits most people.

Rather than define the one true categorisation schema and taxonomy, I think we should permit the channel author some flexibility, but still allow content aggregators some real meat to kickstart their categorisation.

I propose the following new element, by way of an example for an RSS channel associate with a book on encryption software:

<category>

<method>yahoo.com</method>

<value>Computers_and_Internet/Internet/World_Wide_Web/Security_and_Encryption</value>

<value>Business_and_Economy/Shopping_and_Services/Books/Booksellers/Computers/Internet/Titles/World_Wide_Web</value>

</category>

<category>

<method>dmoz.org</method>

<value>Computers/Security/Products_and_Tools/Cryptography/</value>

<value>Business/Industries/Publishing/Publishers/Nonfiction/Computers</value>

</category>

notes:

1) You can have multiple <value> items in each category.

2) You can have multiple <category> items.

3) Users can define their own methods. Yahoo and DMOZ are recommended, with DMOZ "more" recommended.

4) the <value> string is a list of "/" seperated values, from broadest to most specific.

Now the pedantic among you will probably disagree with me as to the ideal place in Yahoo and DMOZ to categorise this content. But this is missing the point. The point is that armed with the above data, the job of classifying this RSS document in any new category tree is made vastly simpler.

Even if my category tree does not align precisely with Yahoo or DMOZ, there is going to be some overlap. And the <value> string contains some good keywords, which I can disambigaute using WordNet or similar to automatically align with my own arbitrary hierarchy.

For aggregation portals targetting narrow niches, it is a simple job to find relevant RSS channels using a hand-compiled list of relevant paths on Yahoo and DMOZ.

The presence of these new items should not upset existing RSS clients (I hope they have been coded to ignore unknown elements).

Perhaps it would be clearer with an explaination of what I am trying to do with RSS, and where I have been struggling to apply RSS.

I publish a vertical search portal. http://www.growinglifestyle.com/h/garden/index.html

Currently it covers 2 topics (more are coming), one of which is gardening.

I scrape the top gardening web sites for articles (and only the articles), and assemble it in a categorised hierarchy. So the user can browse the hierarchy (like Yahoo), or do a full-text search (like Altavista). But no matter which way they look, they will only get quality articles on gardening.

What I have just done is add an RSS file at each node (well a few thousand nodes anyway) on this hierarchy. For example, there is an RSS file for "gardening", for "plants", for "bulbs" and for "tulips" (progressively narrower topics). Each of these RSS files is a weblog, displaying a time ordered sequence of articles being added to the tree. I'm adding about 1000 articles a week at the top level, so as you go down the tree the RSS files get quieter until the final nodes may only get 1 article added per month or two.

Why have I created so many RSS files? Well, not everybody is interested in everything. You in effect customise the RSS feed that suits your needs. If all you are interested in are "Dahlias", then that is all you will get. And publishing it in RSS makes re-purposing the content so much easier.

Actually, I am even thinking of adding an RSS file for every possible search phrase. In this case, the RSS file would be ordered by rank rather than time. Would you subscribe to such an RSS channel? Probably not as it would not change so often, but you might want to fetch it on demand. For example, a shopping site might want to display articles about each of their products. They could create a unique url containing the keywords and phrases, grab the rss file corresponding to that search, and display it using an RSS-reading content module.

So what is the problem?

Well how can I let other sites know the RSS channels I offer?

It is not really a good idea to add several thousand narrow channels to userland, and then have userland hammer my site every hour.

I could (and am) creating an OCS description, but this does not describe the categorisation or even the hierarchy. And I run the risk of having aggregators blindly add every single available RSS channel, and fetch them all hourly.

I could (and am) entering some of the more generally useful channels into xmltree and userland. But unless people actually wander all over my site, they will not be aware of the RSS customisation possibilities available.

Another problem with content syndication by RSS is as follows. I am adding around 1000 items per week, with around 1 update event per week. Ideally it would be better to release the articles in real-time, but alas it is computationally (and mentally) much less burdensome to do my processing in batches.

RSS has an implied length of circa 15 items. I know this is not fixed, but an RSS file with 1000 items is definitely considered unfriendly (My.Netscape requests file sizes below 8kB). The problem is that 990 of these new items will never make it onto my 10 element RSS file. Thus 990 items will miss out on the opportunities for content syndication and repurposing that RSS allows.

I am still thinking about the best way to solve this last problem. Some possibilities:

a) Trickle feed the RSS file. Instead of instantly acknowleding the 1000 new articles, the RSS generator could be spoon fed a steady dribble of articles (say 6 per hour = 1000/week). Clients reading the RSS file every single hour will get a chance to see all the new articles.

b) Track the IP address of clients reading the RSS file. Feed each IP address all the articles added since the last time they read the file, with some upper limit. So after a few big gulps of new articles the RSS file will settle down to a list of 10.

Neither of these approaches strikes me as being particularly clean.

I hope this stimulates some discussion about the application of RSS to search engines, instead of just the traditional areas of blogs and news feeds.

Steve

1. How do you get RSS content to appear in a web page.
2. How do you customize the appearance (e.g. width, background color, etc)

Thanks for reading,

Clark Venable

FYI, the XML::RSS module is pretty forgiving as long as the RSS file is well-formed XML. Unfortunately, many RSS files are not. I actually maintain links and other tags in the RSS items by encoding the < and > characters before I parse it. The next version (which I'm working on now), will have a strict mode which will only allow what's in the spec, and an RSS validator.

IMHO, adding tags in RSS items is not recommended if it's being distributed to the general public.

(in cleanup) Unregistered entity: Can't access DESTROY field in object o f class XML::RSS at C:rssXML-RSS-0.5rss2html.pl line 0

At the item level:

<date></date>: This would allow us to specify a particular date for an item. I think it would be nice for those of us who have several days' worth of content in their RDF channel.

At the channel level:

These could be encapsulated in to an <external></external> section that would include all links to outside of the channel.

<about></about> : Much like <link></link> points to the page the channel is for <about></about> could point to a page of information about this channel. this could link to a FAQ or more information about the channel.

<wireless></wireless>: Points to a page where wireless devices can go.

<broadband></broadband>: Points to a page where broadband devices can go.

<narrowband></narrowband>: Points to a page where narrowband devices (browsers for blind people, text-only browsers, etc..) can go

<p3></p3>: Points to a P3P page to check the privacy rules

<sound></sound>: Points to either a VXML source file (which can be read by a VXML browser) or a sound file. For example, it could serve up a radio feed related to this story.

<video></video>: Same as above with video or SMIL file.

That said, here's what a source could look like (changes are bolded and URLs are fictional (but I cut and pasted my .91 channel content for speed reasons)):

-------------- Suggested RSS .92 code starts here --------------

<?xml version="1.0" ?> 
<!DOCTYPE NewDocTypeLinkGoesHere> 
<rss version="0.92">
<channel>
<header>
	<managingEditor>tnl@tnl.net<;/managingEditor> 
	<copyright>Copyright 1999-present, Me.</copyright> 
	<title>TNL.net Newsletter</title> 
	My channel description 
	<language>en-us</language> 
	<rating></rating> 
</header>


<image> 
	<title>TNL.net</title> 
	http://www.tnl.net/images/TNLpalmlogo.gif 
	<width>125</width> 
	<height>44</height> 
	My channel description 
</image>


<external>
	<link>http://www.tnl.net<;/link>
	<about>http://www.tnl.net/about/<;/about>
	<wireless>http://wap.tnl.net<;/wireless>
	<broadband>http://www.tnl.net/100MBpage.html<;/broadband>
	<narrowband>http://www.tnl.net/under1kpage.html<;/narrowband>
	<p3>http://www.tnl.net/p3p.xml<;/p3>
	<sound>http://www.tnl.net/myvoicebasedchannel.vxml<;/sound>
	<video>http://www.tnl.net/myvideofeed.smil<;/video>
</external>


<item>
	<title>Story 1</title> 
	<link>http://www.tnl.net/newsletter/anewstory.html<;/link> 
	Story 1 is described 
	<date>10/13/2000</date>
	</item>


<item>
	<title>Some older story</title> 
	<link>http://www.tnl.net/newsletter/olderstory.html<;/link> 
	Happy New Year 
	<date>01/01/2000</date>
</item>


</channel> 
</rss>

-------------- Suggested RSS .92 code ends here ----------------

As part of the deal, I'd also move the original channel link and image link into the external field under a single link header (unless some people can tell me where they have a different link for the image and the channel.

Your thoughts on this?

TNL

PS: Full disclosure time - My interest in syndication is related to both past and present. For starters, I have my own personal web site that I use to publish a newsletter (and offer a channel). Providing an easy to use format for summary distribution is a great way to increase traffic to it and expose people to my ideas. Second, I'm starting a company called Moveable Media (http://www.moveablemedia.com), which is trying to bridge the gap between online and offline media. While online syndication is WAY in the future for us (we're first focusing on providing tools that will allow people to deal with freelancers), it is something that we are seeing as a potential future arena for us.

PPS: The email to the syndication list I sent can be found here: http://www.egroups.com/message/syndication/698

I am newly joined system administrator in pgsl company. I faced this probelum many times, is given below. 1.my hardisk is crased, but there are 3 parations in it (C,D,E) the paration C is having operting sysytem files,D and E is having data files.I used stratup disk and format the C drive, but drive D is become c and E become D. I am sure that drive c is formated. But why this happend i still tay to find this ans.. .Please tell me about this reasion.

http://backend.userland.com/rss092 http://backend.userland.com/rss091

Nowhere do I see a DTD for RSS 0.91 or 0.92. And there is no DOCTYPE element in the sample file gratefulDead.xml

Is there a DTD for this file type? I work in XML for a living and I'm quite surprised to not see a DTD at least referenced on the spec pages.