I'm not sure if I've understood you correctly, but if this could be used as
a hint to the aggregator on how best to process/display the feed then I
think it's a great idea.
For example, knowing that a feed was a collection of images (e.g. a Flickr
feed) would enable the aggregator to automatically display the entries as an
image thumbnail list. A feed of calendar events (using a microformat of some
sort) could be automatically added to the user's calendar. I'm sure there
are many other ways in which this could be useful.
My only worry is that without some kind of profile registry it would be very
difficult for an aggregator to do anything meaningful with the data. Where
would you find a list of all existing profiles? If there are 10 different
profiles that all suggest more or less the same thing which one(s) should an
aggregator support? Perhaps we could start with a predefined set of
well-known profiles?
I really think this idea has great potential though.
Regards
James
James M Snell wrote:
Another subject that has come up in recent discussions is an extension
that can be used to specify the purpose of a feed. For example, is the
feed an archive, is it a podcast, is it used for discovering web services
or publishing blog content, etc.
The approach that I have in mind is to use link[rel="profile"] where the
href points to a profile document of some sort.
