James Holderness wrote:
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.
Yes, that's exactly what it's for.
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?
That's precisely why I want the profile references to be dereferenceable
into some form of profile document that can describe the profile. I
considered a registry of profiles but wasn't sure if that was a good
idea or not. Still stewing on it. I definitely think the definition of
profiles needs to be a community effort, much like the way that the
microformats community is working collaboratively to define microformat
profiles.
- James
