FDML
One of the sessions on Sunday morning at FOO Camp was a brainstorming session on how a site could provide a list of feeds.
This session was initiated by Jeremy Zawodny. I didn't capture a list of participants, but from memory some of the more vocal people were Tim Bray, Jeff Barr, Dirk-Willem van Gulik, and Dave Sifry and, of course, Jeremy himself.
A working name for this effort is "FDML". The stands for Feed (Discovery / Directory / Detailing) Markup Language, depending on who you ask. ;-)
We did not get to the point where we created a concrete proposal, but here are some of the use cases that were discussed:
- A single site provides a number of feeds that subset the information by subject
- A single site provides a number of feeds that contain the same information, but in a variety of formats
- A site provides a list of feeds that reside on a variety of hosts that are somehow related (example given was "Microsoft bloggers")
- For extremely large lists, this information may need to be organized hierarchically
- Version information
- Title of the list
- Description of the list (perhaps optional?)
- Parent (where to find a list which contains this list)
- Children (a way to organize extremely large lists)
- Generator (information on the tool that produced this list)
- title of the feed
- link (where to find the feed, relative to the list)
- description of the feed
- unique id of the feed (feeds that differ only in format or version would have the same id)
- type (examples: full text, summary)
- format+version (format examples: rss, cdf, atom, scriptingNews, opml, etc)
- subject (optional)
- author of the feed (optional)
- update frequency (optional)
- generator (optional)
- modified (optional)
- weblog (optional)
In order to further this discussion, I have created a wiki and seeded it with this information. Jeremy also indicated that he was going to set up a mailing list.
Update: Apparently between the time I took the notes and posted them, Dave Winer posted a myPublicFeeds.opml RFC.
Update 2: Related discussion is happening on the Syndication mailing list