Don Box: Tim Ewald, Joe Beda, ChrisAn and I are trying to
get the new format for exchanging items working. Here's a
preview of what it looks like now
This format has a number of interesting twists. First, it
is document literal XML which
Anonymous
[presumably Gary Burd] doesn't particularly feel is vi
compatible. I'd bet that Don's example was entered in
Emacs. Note that the cited xhtml namespace incorrectly points
to the same namespace as the blog content.
Like
prior iterations from Don, the content is included literally,
with no need for encoding. This brings up two questions: if
literal XML encoding is acceptable for the body, why is it all of a
sudden unacceptable for headers? And how should multi-line
headers, like the short description (sometimes referred to
excerpts) be encoded?
What is also interesting about this example is that it separates
the metadata from the content. While this surprised me, it
does makes sense from a SOAP processing model perspective: the one
element in the body is intended for the ultimate destination (in
SOAP parlance, this is the default actor) and must be understood,
the others may be handled by intermediaries and/or disregarded.
I'm not sure what the right split between data and metadata is
in this instance. The split that Don, et. al. proposes does
have the disadvantage of precluding the ability to the functional
equivalent of
pingbacks.
The only thing I'm interested in is which blog posting format you are going to support for comments.
Your blog is the only one I've seen which supports comments that I tend to regularly post to so whatever you support is what's going to end up in RSS Bandit.
Of course, thinking about it I'd love that whatever format ended up being accepted in the blogging world would be flexible enough to support authentication. Once that happens I might end up pressuring Rusty to support it on K5. :)
PS: You need to teach your splell checker that blog is a word.
I can't help but smile as I read your analysis - it's as if you were in the room when we were editing the schema!
All of that said, I don't think we're quite at the "proposal" stage - rather, we're simply noodling with some ideas and trying to be transparent about it.
Hmmm... reinventing the wheel is, in many occasions, a great approach, but I think this wheel is a step backwards. I much prefer the rss-in-soap approach over the lets-in-invent-yet-another-namespace-that-contains-the-same-information approach.
James,
I can't help but agree with you. Reusing an already existing technology that seems to overlap 100% and is already widely used seems to make sense.
Given the choice between reusing an existing technology (i.e. just code) and creating a brand new one (i.e.reading yet another spec) I definitely would prefer the former. It seems Don doesn't want us to follow his advice. :)
A New Spec that extensively leverages existing broadly adopted specs is goodness. A New Spec that extensively reinvents existing broadly adopted specs without good reason is not goodness. The problem with extending the existing Trackback is that it doesn't leverage existing specs and simply extending Trackback doesn't allow for very clean convergence (trackback + comments + pingback + REST + etc etc)... which is what we need to take blog function up a few levels. Sure, it's widely adopted, but so is COM.
Eventually we'll see convergence one way or the other. The right solution will be whichever one the most people choose to implement.
For the record, none of the ideas I've seen floated so far are wrong. What I see are degrees of desirability. And for me, reusing existing specs is most desirable even if we need to invent new specs to allow us to reuse those specs. Make sense?
Don's non-proposal garnered considerable criticism for not providing the appropriate amount of respect for prior art. The following modest change to the header should address this: <soap:Header xmlns="http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/"> ...
Dare Obasanjo: Your blog is the only one I've seen which supports comments that I tend to regularly post to so whatever you support is what's going to end up in RSS Bandit. What Joe Gregorio has defined will undoubtedly get supported in Aggie and ...
Due to persistant prodding by Dare, I've created an addendum dictionary. Leave comments here if there are particularly troublesome words that you would like ...