Subject: [Fwd: trends in syndication: Atom, media RSS, sitemaps, earth maps]

From: Dan Connolly <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 10 Aug 2005 11:24:29 -0500

Perhaps this is worth some time at our next teleconference...

-- 
Dan Connolly, W3C http://www.w3.org/People/Connolly/
D3C2 887B 0F92 6005 C541  0875 0F91 96DE 6E52 C29E

Subject: trends in syndication: Atom, media RSS, sitemaps, earth maps
From: Dan Connolly <[email-masked]>
To: [email-masked]
Date: Wed, 10 Aug 2005 10:48:50 -0500

I gather it's all over but the crying for the Atom publishing
format. Congrats!
http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/200x/2005/07/14/Atom-1.0
http://ietfreport.isoc.org/idref/draft-ietf-atompub-format/

Meanwhile, I'm seeing something of a syndication trend in
a bunch of recent announcements from W3C members:

December 2004

Yahoo created the Media RSS Module;
http://search.yahoo.com/mrss
a Feb 2005 revision incorporates community feedback.
2 June 2005

An item in the Google blog
http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2005/06/webmaster-friendly.html
introduced the Google Sitemaps (BETA) Protocol
https://www.google.com/webmasters/sitemaps/docs/en/protocol.html
that allows webmasters to inform search engines about URLs on their
websites that are available for crawling. 
28 June 2005

An iTunes® 4.9 announcement from Apple
http://www.apple.com/pr/library/2005/jun/28podcast.html
introduced some RSS extensions for podcasting. (Apple opened
discussion/feedback forum, syndication-dev, on 28 July.)
http://lists.apple.com/archives/syndication-dev/
30 June 2005

A Yahoo! Maps open API announcement
http://www.ysearchblog.com/archives/000136.html
showed support for using the Basic Geo (WGS84 lat/long) Vocabulary in
development in the W3C Semantic Web Interest Group.
http://www.w3.org/2003/01/geo/
24 June 2005

An announcement in the IEBlog
http://blogs.msdn.com/ie/archive/2005/06/24/432390.aspx
showed that RSS in Microsoft Longhorn includes Simple List Extensions.
http://msdn.microsoft.com/longhorn/understanding/rss/simplefeedextensions/

We currently use XHTML and RSS/RDF to syndicate our news.
http://www.w3.org/2000/08/w3c-synd/

Some relevant points in W3C's history:

The design space around things like the google sitemap
were discussed at this workshop:

Distributed Indexing/Searching Workshop 
 May 28-19, 1996 in Cambridge, Massachusetts
 http://www.w3.org/Search/9605-Indexing-Workshop/

And we had CDF and the push workshop:

 March 1997 CDF submission
 http://www.w3.org/TR/NOTE-CDFsubmit.html

 September 1997 push workshop
 http://www.w3.org/Architecture/9709_Workshop/

An more recently:

TAG issue siteData-36 accepted 23 Feb 2003
http://www.w3.org/2001/tag/issues.html?type=1#siteData-36

I get questions occasionally about how W3C and IETF relate in
this space, so I thought I'd share at least the background facts
that I'm aware of here, and see if any helpful discussion
results.

-- 
Dan Connolly, W3C http://www.w3.org/People/Connolly/
D3C2 887B 0F92 6005 C541  0875 0F91 96DE 6E52 C29E