On Sun, 27 Jan 2008, James Holderness wrote:
Sylvain Hellegouarch wrote:
Atom may have come from the blogging world but it's pretty clear that it
gradually becomes the de facto envelop format for any kind of exchange.
The question is why? I don't see much benefit in using Atom over some
proprietary form of XML (but plenty of disadvantages) unless you specifically
intend the data to be readable in a typical, blog-reading, Atom client as
well.
Having built a heavily-used (here at UT Austin) CMS/DAM with Atom as the
standard internal XML format, I have found all kinds of benefits (many of
which I could've predicted, some I couldn't):
-tool/library support
-feed validator that allows me to sanity-check all sorts of internal
operations
-"introspecting" internal application processes w/ nothing more than
Firefox
-ability to "subscribe" to internal processes (including highly
configurable search results) with a news reader/live bookmarks, etc.
-sereniditous re-use opportunities (e.g. "let's make a podcast of this
search...")
-lightweight integration with MANY other systems of which all I need to
ask is: "parse and Atom feed"
to enumerate just a few.
Thus, this talk of a better/enhanced mechanism for media description is of
great interest, and I have high hopes that some consensus s=can be
reached.
--peter keane
I suspect there's a lot of cargo-cult engineering behind many uses of Atom
outside the blogging world. Just because you can wrap your data in an Atom
envelope, that doesn't mean you should.
However if we decide to extend the atom vocabulary like Yahoo did with
Media-RSS, we ought to actually discuss first with the main players in the
field today (Apple, Microsoft, Xiph, EXIF, etc.) in order to define the
minimal relevant set of metadata for common media formats.
We're back to the use-case of "have metadata - must publish". Why? Who wants
that metadata? What for?
Regards
James
