Sean McGrath: NIFT is one of those things that has been in my peripheral vision for a long time but I have not had the chance to look at it more closely. How does this sit with blogs/rss/peaw?
First I've heard of it. Quick impressions: body.content is well formed XML. The head, body.head, and body.end look like they have considerably more metadata than anything I have considered - not surprising as these guys do this for a living.
Wow, I'd mostly forgotten about NIFT. Back around '98 or '99, I was looking into NIFT as a way to represent and store articles and news items for an online zine my roommate and I were working on. Was also looking into the format around the same time for a work project.
The online zine never quite materlialized, but it got me interested in news syndication and what are now weblogs. Now that I think about it, I'm a bit surprised that NIFT has never (or at least rarely) come up in discussions of RSS or other syndication tech (ie. That which is not Echo)
l.m., NewsML has come up a few times in the context of RSS, I think it was always put down again as too complicated.
also I remember it being discussed as "RSS will do headlines, and if you want to do real syndication, you'll use NewsML".
the nearly complete lack of tools for working with it, and said complexity (i made the same mistake of printing out the spec) has always been a major turn off. however it is a great stalking horse when someone starts complaining about the difficulty of RSS 1.0 :)
Woah. (insert wide-eyed stare with characterstic lack of emotion).
That's a bit overkill not just for my needs, but for anything I would be willing to learn to use on personal websites ;) However, it seems to me to excuse any and all attempts to simplify RSS/Pie/Echo/Atom/Et Al ... I mean, if people want the semantic web, they should be parsing NIFT files ;)
In the better late than never dept....
NITF lets you describe the body of a news article in a formatting-free way.
The documentation and tutorial on NITF have been greatly revamped since a few years back -- check them out at http://www.nitf.org if you haven't in a while.
NITF is an ideal complement for RSS, and I'd like to get in contact with any RSS veterans that may have suggestions for how we get the word out.
I also plan to add a big RSS+NITF example to the nitf.org site.
(We had exploratory merger talks with NIFT a few years back, but things fell apart when they started making cracks about my wardrobe.)
re: "We had exploratory merger talks with NIFT a few years back, but things fell apart when they started making cracks about my wardrobe."
Talks with RSS veterans? Fall apart? With personal attacks? That's hard to imagine.