Hi folks,
A small group of which I'm a member has been working on a specification
for describing activities as Atom entries. An "activity" for our
purposes is an action a user has taken on a social website, such as
posting a photo or marking it as a favorite.
The draft we have so far is here:
http://martin.atkins.me.uk/specs/activitystreams/atomactivity
In the process of working this through, we discovered a number of other
problems that we believe require Atom extensions to solve, so we've also
got drafts of a number of peripheral specifications.
As Sam Ruby posted earlier in the month[1], one issue encountered was
the lack of a standard way to publish media items such as photos and
videos in Atom. While a couple of publishers (notably Google properties)
use the elements from MediaRSS for this purpose, the few implementations
I found were inconsistent. It was suggested that a more Atom-shaped
media specification might be useful, so we drafted up this:
http://martin.atkins.me.uk/specs/atommedia
We also have a small specification for describing the "service provider"
that hosts a feed (for example, YouTube or Twitter). This is intended to
be similar in design to atom:author.
http://martin.atkins.me.uk/specs/activitystreams/provider
Finally, we have a small extension to Atom Threading Extensions to allow
some metadata about the parent entry to be included in the child so that
consumers can avoid fetching source feeds in certain cases. This is
intended to be similar in principle to atom:source
http://martin.atkins.me.uk/specs/activitystreams/commentmeta
I'm well aware that these drafts need plenty more editorial work, and
may need more detail in certain spots, but since some folks are ready to
start implementing based on these drafts I wanted to throw them out here
to get a few more eyes on them, so that if there are any major problems
with the technical direction we're taking we might fix them before there
are too many implementations to change.
I would appreciate it if folks here would cast a critical eye over what
we're proposing and let me know if you see fundamental flaws in our
approach to any of these problems.
We will of course continue to refine these documents and hopefully we
would be able to bring some or all of them over here and work on them
with the wider Atom community.
Thanks,
Martin
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[1]http://www.imc.org/atom-syntax/mail-archive/msg20818.html
