James Abley wrote:
Hi, The background for this request is that my company helps our partners deliver content on mobile internet platforms. We are trying to guide our partners into producing a common feed format that can be easily re-purposed and doesn't require specialist tools to handle. I'm trying to define a feed format for content which will be potentially produced by a variety of producers (news agencies, games companies, audio file producers and video producers as a starting point). The initial use case is purely for news, games and audio, so I'm dealing with multiple content types of media items. Atom is my own preferred choice (interop, tool support, etc) rather than anything else, so I've been trying to match my gut feel about how to implement this with what I've been reading in the archives for this list. My initial problem - meta-data ------------------------------------------- I think I can use the Yahoo Media RSS Module for RSS 2.0 [1], which should cover that. Otherwise, I'd need to introduce something similar to that module, which covers the shortfall. Or should I be using RDF or Dublin Core? Any experience or suggestions with this?
I've seen the both the Yahoo and iTunes extensions being used. I don't believe there is any one approach that would be recommended over the others.
Next problem - content expiry ------------------------------------------- Predominantly I think this is required for news agencies, so that they have control over what gets displayed downstream. My initial ideas, seemingly confirmed by the archives, are for one of the following: 1. A separate feed, the semantics of which are understood to indicate content expiry / deletion. 2. Tombstones. 3. Expiry explicitly indicated on feed items, again with an extension element / attribute, or RDF or Dublin Core. I think that the Tombstone discussion is going to go on for a while, and I'm quite comfortable with the idea of the first choice, unless anyone violently disagrees.
For the short term, #1 would likely be your best bet as it requires the least amount of invention and would be the easiest to migrate over to whatever the final tombstone approach becomes.
Final problem (for now!) - editorial control / lead articles ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Certain content producers have indicated that they need to be able to define importance on a feed entry; e.g. the story about the US election should be treated as the lead story, and the story about someone's lost dog is the "...and finally..." story that we can put at the bottom of a page. I haven't seen anything in core Atom about this, so maybe it's the extension element, or RDF or Dublin Core route again?
In Lotus Connections, we use atom:category elements for this. You could do so also, e.g.
<category scheme="http://example.org/importance"; term="lead" />
Related subject - having multiple images for an item, with different semantics on the images; e.g. this one is the image related to the story subject matter; e.g. picture of Presidential candidate; this one is the headshot of the columnist that authored the story. For that, along with the extension element / RDF / Dublin Core options, I have the added choice of using a (non-official) link relation extension. <atom:link rel="http://example.com/headshot"; src="path/to/person.jpg" type="image/jpeg" /> <atom:link rel="http://example.com/story"; src="path/to/clinton.jpg" type="image/jpeg" />
This is an excellent solution.
This is where I'm least sure of what the right thing to do would be. James Snell recently blogged about proposing to OSCON a session on designing Atom extensions. I need it a little earlier than I thought!
:-) - James
Cheers, James [1] http://search.yahoo.com/mrss [2] http://www.snellspace.com/wp/?p=848
