NITF version 3.2

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)

Posted by l.m.orchard at
Oh yeah, and I remember printing the NIFT documentation and I was surprised by the department admin assistant bringing it to me in a binder.  Oops: a few more pages than I'd thought.  Heh  :)

Posted by l.m.orchard at

1. Its NITF
2. Its focus is more on content markup, and less on the packaging and syndication, where NewsML kicks in. They both have their benefits, complexities, and relationships with other existing standards (e.g. PRISM, which overlaps a bit with both and has some other surprises in store for some readers).
3. Its disappointing that this is the first Sam's heard of NITF. This further validates my concerns regarding the PEAW project's (lack of) research into, respect for, and leveraging of prior art. Oh well. If anyone's interested in investing in a new start-up, I've invented something I call a "wheel".

Posted by Jeremy Gray at
1. It's "it's", not "its"
2. The real story here is obviously NIFT, the National Institute of Fashion Technology.
3. They're the educational division of the Indian Ministry of Textiles.  They offer courses in textile and leather design, technology, management and merchandising.  They have centers all over India, including Bangalore, Chennai, Gandhinagar, Hyderabad, New Delhi, Mumbai, and Kolkata.
4. It's disappointing that Jeremy hasn't heard of NIFT.  This further validates my concerns regarding his (lack of) research into, respect for, and leveraging of mad G00g1e ski11z.  Oh well. If anyone's interested in investing in a new start-up, I've invented something I call a "bozo bit".

Posted by Mark at

XML stuff

"Picfolio is a static photo gallery generator using XML and XSLT. It has built-in support for thumbnail and midnail generation, and optional support for EXIF data in images." It sure isn't iPhoto, but it looks nice and the idea to...... [more]

Trackback from Notes from my terminal at

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 :)

Posted by kellan at

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 ;)

Posted by Jaykul at

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.)

Posted by Alan Karben at

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.

Posted by Mark at

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