An Example of RSS Auto-Discovery in WSIL.

<p>Summarizing the discussion on a more advanced RSS auto-discovery format that was recently <a href="http://jeremy.zawodny.com/blog/archives/000967.html">started by Jeremy Zawodny</a>, Diego Doval <a href="http://www.dynamicobjects.com/d2r/archives/002325.html">writes</a>:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>if Tima or someone else would have a bit of time to re-write my mock-up structure using WSIL, it would be most welcome! </p>
</blockquote>
<p>Done. Here is a quick mockup of both approaches Diego used to representing hierarchical content in RSS.</p>
<p>The first is a single file example were I use the <code>dc:subject</code> element to define the category in which a client could group feed pointers.</p>
<p><a href="http://www.timaoutloud.org/files/diego/index.wsil">http://www.timaoutloud.org/files/diego/index.wsil</a></p>
<p>I think this example is pretty self-explanatory. <code>service</code> is the equivalent of RSS&#39;s <code>item</code>.</p>
<p>The second example I constructed uses multiple files and WSIL&#39;s ability to point to feeds and other WSIL files. </p>
<p><a href="http://www.timaoutloud.org/files/diego/index2.wsil">http://www.timaoutloud.org/files/diego/index2.wsil</a><br /><a href="http://www.timaoutloud.org/files/diego/tech.wsil">http://www.timaoutloud.org/files/diego/tech.wsil</a><br /><a href="http://www.timaoutloud.org/files/diego/world.wsil">http://www.timaoutloud.org/files/diego/world.wsil</a><br /><a href="http://www.timaoutloud.org/files/diego/various.wsil">http://www.timaoutloud.org/files/diego/various.wsil</a></p>
<p>index2.wsil contains links to the other files (I used the fictitious news4humans domain in the URLs so you&#39;ll have to do the mappings.)</p>
<p>I think the second option is the way to go because it scales for sites like Yahoo though I don&#39;t have a problem with looking at supporting both. I added a latest news feeds to index2.wsil just to demonstrate that services and links to other WSIL.</p>
<p>There are a few caveats to what I did here.</p>
<ul>
<li>Took a few liberties with the WSIL 1.0 spec, but are completely legal XML. Mainly I used RSS modules to bring in additional meta data where ever needed instead of making up my own tags. </li>
<li>RSS 9x and 2.0 doesn&#39;t have am official namespace which continues to be an unfortunate and continuing design flaw. I made up one for the example &#8211; <a href="http://purl.org/rss/2.0/">http://purl.org/rss/2.0/</a>.</li>
<li><code>dc:anguage</code> should probably be on a per service basis, but for the sake of replicating Diego&#39;s example I left it were it was.</li>
<li><code>service.dc:date</code> should probably be dcterms:modified</li>
<li>Added an abstract, error reports to the examples.</li>
<li>I could have very easily added pointers to web services via WSDL files or UDDI directories. I could have very easily have added Atom feeds or archives or OPML files for that matter.</li>
</ul>
<p>I&#39;m pretty convinced that WSIL is along the lines of what would be optimal in creating one scalable format that can be inclusive to handle many formats in addition to web services. This said, I think WSIL in its current form has much to be desired. For instance, I think supporting extensiblity through namespaces is the way to go, but there are probably too many elements with namespaces in my mockups. Some of the tags names area a bit <q>off</q> and could be better. Let me go out on a limb here &#8211; I&#39;m also not sure the RDF syntax is really much value in this non-RDF format. Could use to factor those out. (I&#39;m sure the semantic web mob will be on me for that.)</p>