intertwingly

The first usage of RSS was to flow data from news producer to portals.  Over time, this evolved into a flow from weblog servers to aggregators.

One of the first truly novel uses of RSS is as a weblog archive format.  In the case of Radio, this required the addition of some tool specific elements, but that is not a problem as RSS 2.0 is extensible through namespaces.  Now, we have a flow from weblog servers to weblog servers.

With the SOAP interface to the RSS validator, we have RSS (with some optional wrapper elements) flowing from weblog software to a validator.  Dave already demonstrated that weblog archives validate as RSS.  This is the beginnings of the network effects that can be possible if common exchange formats are adopted - no new validator needed to be written.

I have suggested that Wouldn't It Be Nice If a converged pingback / trackback mechanism were to focus on a simple POSTing of an RSS fragment (i.e., with perhaps some of the unnecessary RSS wrapper elements removed).  If such a suggestion were adopted, I would gladly modify the existing RSS validator to be able to validate such requests.

At the moment, there is a schism between the Blogger API and the MetaWeblog API.  These both may have their place, but I would like to suggest that weblogging software consider support of the dramatically simpler RESTLog API, possibly in addition to one or both of the above.

Why do I say it is dramatically simpler?  Let's propose a challenge.  In the spirit of the BDG to SOAP 1.1 which exposed all of the machinery of SOAP, I'd like to request that proponents of either the Blogger API or the MetaWeblog API produce a similar BDG for their protocols, and would like to request that it include the first item from the Radio Weblog Post Module example.  I'll start by providing a sample for RESTLogPost.

Any takers?