Epistula Syndication Format

Nicholas Avenell: Are you also fed up with the continuing war between RSS 0.9* and 1.0 and 2.0 and whatever else they invent today? Me too. So today I invented the Epistula Syndication Format. ESF. It isn’t XML. It isn’t RDF. It’s just data. [via DiveIntoMark]  I'm in.

Just Say No To RSS

Sam Ruby picks up the story of the discord in the RSS community by implementing ESF on his site. If... [more]

Trackback from www.davidwatson.org at
ESF cannot be used for site aggregation. See how look your page now in NewsIsFree:
http://www.newsisfree.com/sources/info/3366/
Think, how will look it with ESF?
But maybe ESF is good trigger, witch can start some download agent (wget etc.) for getting real news text.


Posted by Stoyan Zhekov at
It's not designed for aggregation, as such. It's designed to say "these are the last $foo objects on $bar", where $foo can be any number, and $bar can be /anything/. It's designed for the thing most RSS feeds are used for, to know what's been updated and what's new. You could use it for the last 20 CVS commits if you wanted to (And, natch, epistula will, when I get development rolling again). If you want to put someone elses /content/ on your site, or in your program, go ahead. That wasn't what RSS was designed for either, but what it was perverted to. ESF is designed so it can't easily be perverted. Clear, and hardly any overhead at all.

Posted by Aquarion at
I fail to see how the lack of a description field in ESF is a "feature." RSS syndicators have the choice to omit descriptions and other content, link only to their own weblog, and take other traffic-preserving gimmicks. On the other hand, ESF syndicators would have no choice to include descriptions, which often limits feeds to marginal usefulness and fails the original purpose of RSS -- driving traffic to your site.

Posted by Rogers Cadenhead at
It is hard for me to see how it "fails the original purpose of RSS" if description was not available in RSS 0.90, but was added later, based on a similar feature from the "fat" scriptingNews format.

A simple syntax which serves the needs of site aggregation was proposed by Aaron Swartz

Posted by Sam Ruby at

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