Something to cheer Shelley up
Shelley Powers proposed an RDF friendly version of RSS 2.0. Now she is disappointed that people haven't picked up faster on this. Let me do what I can to help cheer Shelley up... now you can view intertwingly in all it's RDF splendor. Perhaps the description shouldn't have been XML encoded? Let me know and I will fix.
Also, I chose to make the rdf:about different than the link. Is this wrong?
How should comments and trackbacks be handled?
Looks like the 2.0 core way to do comments is with a comments element that contains the url to the comments page. Given an aggregator that supports it, that would be enough in some cases.
Other weblogs (mine included, sometimes) are all about the comments. So far, the best thing I've come up with is a separate feed for each entry and its comments, so people who are interested in a thread can keep track of the comments. I think I'm going to include HTML and RSS comment links in the content:encoded element of my 2.0 feed, since I see a fair number of posts where I know on first reading that I'd like to subscribe to the comment feed (if people would get around to creating them).
The ideal solution? Probably mod_comments (which may already exist) with a single element containing the url for the comment feed, and aggregators that will let you choose whether to ignore comments, not even loading anything on your cell phone, or display a count and link, or a list of linked excerpts, or the whole thread inline. I really like the idea (being discussed on RSS-DEV) of external files for modules, as long as it's not required (not everybody's willing to have as high a files to posts ratio as I already do).
Posted by Phil Ringnalda at
Oops, visions of sugarplums distracted me from the TrackBack question. From all her work on Threadneedle, Shelley sees the whole of a TrackBack thread, but having seen Jim Winstead and pb implementing TrackBack through their comment systems, I now see an individual TrackBack ping (from the perspective of the pinged post) as nothing more or less than a remotely hosted comment. So if you are syndicating the post's comments, you should be syndicating the TrackBack pings the same way (roughly: a comment might have comment:text or comment:encoded but no comment:excerpt, while a ping would only have comment:excerpt and comment:link, since that's all you know about).
Posted by Phil Ringnalda at
Thanks, Sam. I'm more interested in seeing a dialog with input from all parties than I am about being personally cheered up, though I appreciate your consideration.
The rdf:about is the URI for the resource -- the unchanging, permanent identifier in URI format. The link can change. Not a problem being different.
How are comments and trackbacks being handled in the non-RDF RSS 2.0? Were they in there? (Reminder to self to examine).
Trackbacks is associated with cross-weblog discussions, and should be in a different document -- different focus of business (i.e. weblog RSS files focus on weblog, and weblog postings; trackback focuses on weblog dialogs).
And comments -- do we want these in the same RSS file? Seems messy.
Hopefully the comments will take.
Posted by Shelley powers at