Greetings, The Internet Draft for Metalink is available at http://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-bryan-metalink-02 with interim revisions at http://metalinks.svn.sourceforge.net/viewvc/metalinks/internetdraft/ .
We're looking for review and public comments. Metalink is currently supported by some 35 applications and used by projects such as OpenOffice.org, openSUSE, Ubuntu, cURL, and others. Metalink is an XML-based document format that describes a file or lists of files to be added to a download queue. Lists are composed of a number of files, each with an extensible set of attached metadata. For example, each file can have a description, checksum, and list of URIs that it is available from. The primary use case that Metalink addresses is the description of downloadable content in a format so download agents can act intelligently and recover from common errors with little or no user interaction necessary. These errors can include multiple servers going down and data corrupted in transmission. Example .metalink file: <?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?> <metalink xmlns="http://www.metalinker.org"> <published>2008-05-15T12:23:23Z</published> <files> <file name="example.ext"> <identity>Example</identity> <version>1.0</version> <description>A description of the example file for download.</description> <verification> <hash type="md5">83b1a04f18d6782cfe0407edadac377f</hash> <hash type="sha-1">80bc95fd391772fa61c91ed68567f0980bb45fd9 </hash> </verification> <resources> <url>ftp://ftp.example.com/example.ext</url> <url>http://example.com/example.ext</url> </resources> </file> </files> </metalink> Thank you, -- (( Anthony Bryan ... Metalink [ http://www.metalinker.org ] )) Easier, More Reliable, Self Healing Downloads