RFP Available XML
This may be daft, but how about a simple format that indicates which feeds and XML metadata files and such are available on a site. Most sites are getting to have lots of stuff available, with RSS and FOAF and XFML and what not. A simple file with Available Xml and other formats would mean that:
- you only need to link to 1 file from every page
- if it has a last updated date a lot of bandwidth can be saved.
Something like this:
<avx>
<file url="http://urloffile.com/metadata/file.xml" homepage="http://urlofhomepage.com"
type="RSS 1.0" typeurl="http://urloftypespec.com/rss1.htm"
latestupdate="10.30.00 10-04-2003">
<name>Frogs feed</name>
<description>Latest content in the frog category</description>
</file>
</avx>
AVX stands for Available XML. (but it could also point to RDF files and such) In the file element, the url attribute points to the file in question, the homepage url to the homepage of the site that file refers to (this is the only attribute I'm not sure about), type is a string indicating the type of feed, typeurl points to the spec of the type. We need both for human readability and for specs that don't have a homepage. If anyone has a better solution for the type/typeurl combination for identifying a type of feed (maybe namespace?) please comment. The lastupdate field needs a better way of indicating time, but is crucial: it means a lot of bandwidth can be saved by checking this (presumably shortish) file instead of downloading large RSS 2.0 or XFML files.