We use a constrained dialect of XHTML to express channels in the RSS sense:
<div class="item"> on the page indicates
an RSS item
h2 or
h3 element; this serves as the item's title.p element that serves as the
item's description.p element should contain an <a
rel="details" href="...ref...">...</a> which is taken
as the URI of the item.This dialect also includes the popular convention for linking to additional RDF metadata such as Dublin Core Subject, Description, Date, Format, Language, Creator, Publisher, and Rights:
<link rel="meta" href="Overview-about.rdf" />
This dialect (more formally, metadata profile as specified in section 6.12 Link types of the HTML 4.0 specification) should be declared explicitly ala <head profile="http://www.w3.org/2000/08/w3c-synd/#">.
Share and enjoy:
The W3C at meerkat channel seems to be working (Sep 2000). Keep your fingers crossed!
In an RSS-DEV discussion, Teun Duynstee contributed edits to support RSS 0.92. Danbri integrated them (2001-05-31) into home2rss092.xsl, which produces an RSS 0.92 feed. Please send suggestions/fixes to RSS-DEV.
Following the Aug 2000 announcement of RSS-ala-RDF (thanks Ian, Rael, Danbri, and Guha!), and my notes on Semantic Web screen scraping (e.g. HyperRDF), I developed this little transformation that turns the W3C home page into RSS.
This isn't a really original idea; see XHTML-to-RSS Extractor service by Evic van der VList and DanBri; one of the RSS tools.
W3C has taken a "framework" approach to things like channels, packages and such. We had the CDF submission in March '97, OSD and DRP in Aug '97. We held a Sep '97 push workshop and ended up pursuing RDF, a general framework for resource description and metadata, rather than particular vocabularies.
The idea behind this sort of generalized approach is that it adds just a little cost/complexity to each of the applications, but in return, each application is part of a richer whole. Convincing the developers of the first few applications when they can't see the benefits is a challenge. (See also: the HTTP extension framework [@@link], XML namespaces, etc.)
But imagine what the Web would be like if you needed a different client for search services, online documentation, community forums, and online banking. Actually, you don't have to imagine, you can probably just remember: you have used pre-web online information services, haven't you? ;-)
RSS is a very successful metadata application, and I am enthusiastic about the move to (re-)align it with RDF. In this little application alone, I'm using RDF to leverage the RSS vocabulary and the Dublin Core vocabulary in the same description of our site.
Dom and Susan have done the bulk of the work of applying this technology in W3C's operations. See especially Automating the publication of Technical Reports. It would be nice to do software releases ala DOAP.
The Grounding link relationships and classes section in HyperRDF is some earlier, related work. GRDDL is a generalization of these techniques.
$Log: Overview.html,v $ Revision 1.26 2005/05/20 20:04:50 connolly item title can be h2 or h3 Revision 1.25 2004/11/05 22:13:27 connolly restored meta anchor Revision 1.24 2004/11/05 19:20:55 connolly whitespace, linebreak Revision 1.23 2004/11/05 10:41:53 dom more subtle markup to identify "#" as a profile rather than the HTML document itself Revision 1.22 2004/11/04 16:18:04 dom really Revision 1.21 2004/11/04 16:16:58 dom proper GRDDL transformer link Revision 1.20 2004/11/04 16:14:19 dom uri simplification Revision 1.19 2004/11/04 16:12:26 dom getting rid of RDDL, making it valid XHTML Strict Revision 1.18 2004/11/04 15:15:15 connolly Update prompted by weekly markup checker: - revert title/h1 to be about one convention for site summaries, not all profiles at W3C - revise how-to text to emphasize how-to over background spec links - fold rel="meta" convention into the one profile - made the RSS 0.92 stuff into complete sentences - relativize more links - fold references inline - folded acks into background; updated related/future work - localize move RDDL ns decl; hope to remove it - us-ascii encoding - added CVS changelog ---------------------------- revision 1.17 date: 2004/10/19 16:03:04; author: dom; state: Exp; lines: +7 -6 grddl-enabling ---------------------------- revision 1.16 date: 2003/09/01 17:40:11; author: slesch; state: Exp; lines: +1 -1 tweak ---------------------------- revision 1.15 date: 2003/09/01 16:55:01; author: slesch; state: Exp; lines: +168 -118 added meta link type ---------------------------- revision 1.14 date: 2001/05/31 17:24:11; author: danbri; state: Exp; lines: +1 -2 removed newline wrap ---------------------------- revision 1.13 date: 2001/05/31 17:15:47; author: danbri; state: Exp; lines: +15 -1 added information about the RSS 0.92 experiment ---------------------------- revision 1.12 date: 2000/11/17 16:31:31; author: connolly; state: Exp; lines: +3 -4 changed the title to connote less endorsement and to reflect the applicability of this tool to any/all web sites. ---------------------------- revision 1.11 date: 2000/11/16 23:58:07; author: danbri; state: Exp; lines: +7 -3 removed link to alternate version, added mention of the recent change ---------------------------- revision 1.10 date: 2000/11/16 22:53:59; author: danbri; state: Exp; lines: +5 -2 added link to new XSLT file to track changes in the RSS 1.0 proposal. ---------------------------- revision 1.9 date: 2000/09/16 06:16:03; author: connolly; state: Exp; lines: +31 -21 (connolly) Changed through Jigsaw. ---------------------------- revision 1.8 date: 2000/08/31 22:10:35; author: connolly; state: Exp; lines: +2 -2 fixed channel param ---------------------------- revision 1.7 date: 2000/08/31 22:01:47; author: connolly; state: Exp; lines: +19 -1 added form ---------------------------- ... ---------------------------- revision 1.1 date: 2000/08/22 21:59:36; author: connolly; state: Exp; Overview.html