intertwingly

Phil Ringnalda. Even though I can hear Sam muttering digital magpie in my ear...  Phil, you say this like it is a bad thing.   I believe that you and I have common tendencies when it comes to exploration, but when it comes to choices, I find that I have a tendency to pick the dull and boring ones.

As to the topic of blog browsers, I do have a number of thoughts.  One set of thoughts is that the data being captured is not merely hierarchical, it is actually  hierarchical faceted metadata.  But mostly my thoughts are to the dull and boring topics of the file format itself.

For starters, my site is generated dynamically.  This means that you can see any blog entry, day, month, or year in any of several formats.  Here's August in rss2.  June 11th in txt.  Entries containg "Ringnalda" in esf.  I could also slice by categories if I were to use that particular feature.  You get the idea.  So, for starters, I'd like some name other than simply ".xml" for the files.xml format... then I could enable it everywhere.

Now as to the file format itself, it appears tailored to blogging applications that statically render their content.  What are the created and modified dates for each of the dynamically renderable slices I identified above?  Should I calculate number of bytes in each in anticipation that it might need to be generated?

It is also not clear how one extends this format.  If you look at my archives page, you can see that I have readily available a count of the number of entries.  Might this be useful?

Unfortunately, I can see how this dicussion will play out.  Somebody will say that  "files.xml is not a brilliant format. It is a compromise. It is for blog browsers. That's all it is for, for the 18,000th time."   Then three months later will say that it is the perfect format for some other application that none of us have thought of yet.  And nobody will be clear as to what applications are out there using this format, let alone know what the impact will be of any change.

We've played this game before.  Why not learn from the past?

All I am saying is: give this format a name.  And a namespace.  And specify from the beginning how (or even if) it can be extended.