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Subject: 
Re: LENNI Additions to RSS/Atom spec - preliminary proposal
Newsgroups: 
lugnet.publish
Date: 
Tue, 31 Aug 2004 13:45:57 GMT
Viewed: 
2574 times
  
(Bah!  Have to use the web interface, which means I can't reply to all three
posts I wanted to in one post. Copied from my Sent folder. )

On Tue, Aug 31, 2004 at 06:04:39AM +0000, Kelly McKiernan wrote:
RECOMMENDED ADDITIONAL XML ELEMENTS

I am proposing the addition of the following six elements to existing
RSS/Atom elements. Each of these six elements will be defined by the
LENNI namespace (location TBD). These elements are all to be placed
within the ITEM/ENTRY section (RSS/Atom, respectively) of the XML
feed, with the potential exception of the "Community" element, which
may reside one level higher in the XML structure.

In general, I wouldn't limit us to only Item level elements.  That might
be a guideline for implementation, but it shouldn't be an official
requirement, right?

The structure of the proposal below is of the form:
* PROPOSED ELEMENT
  - Acceptable Value
  - Acceptable Value
  - ...


===============================================
* COMMUNITY (required - one only)
  - LEGO

When using the LENNI namespace, the Community element is required. It
is the only LENNI-defined required element. "LEGO" is the only value
that should be recognized by the LENNI namespace at this time.

If the usefulness of LENNI becomes apparent outside the LEGO
community, it would be helpful to share the LENNI namespace with
little or no changes for use in other communities. (Note: wishful
thinking at its best.)

QUESTION: Should this one element only be placed in the
CHANNEL/FEED (RSS/Atom) section, as it covers all items/entries?
I'm leaning that way.

Feed level makes sense to me.  Also, start thinking of alternate
meanings to LENNI, if it does go beyond LEGO, the 'L' would have to find
a new meaning :)

===============================================
* FILTER (one or more per item/entry)
  - News: article-type content including information and picture
    links, usually presented under an organization or group
  - Blog: personal musings and observations, usually from an
    individual
  - MOC: Information and links specifically about a custom LEGO
    creation
  - Announcement: Press release-type content, either from an
    organization or an individual
  - Event: Usually used with Calendar element, but that is not
    required
  - Market: Specific to marketplace issues, such as buying, selling,
    trading, or advising of such opportunities

These filters will be specified in the LENNI namespace. A previous
suggested name for this element, "Category," is already used in RSS
2.0 for a different purpose, so it can't be used here. The name
"filter" is slightly generic, so other suggestions are welcome.

"Topic"?  "Subject"?  "Compartment"?

Also, is this required?  I'm leaning toward saying it IS.

===============================================
* THEME (one or more per item/entry)
  - Adventure
  - Bionicle
  - Castle
  - Mecha
  - Micro
  - Mosaic
  - Pirate
  - Robotics
  - Sculpture
  - SNOT
  - Space
  - Sports
  - Star Wars
  - Technic
  - Town
  - Train
  - Western

Please submit suggestions for additions to the Theme list. "SNOT" and
"Micro" are technically not themes, and Mosaic/Sculpture also skirt
this category; however, they are arguably important enough to merit
their own Theme entry. As updated Themes become prevalent in LEGO
Communities, they can be added to the LENNI namespace.

I guess we should have an "Other" theme, though ideally, it would allow
things like "Other - Micro", so that filters can use the value.  Of
course, there's no way to enforce that everyone put the same "other - *"
entry, but I think that's the best we can hope for, until we release a
new version of the spec, with themes added to it.

Did that make any sense?  It's still early in the morning...

Btw, is this optional?  If so, it should say so - "one or more" implies
"at least one".

===============================================
* AUDIENCE (one only per item/entry)
  - FOL
  - AFOL
  - KFOL
  - NYFOL (Not Yet Fan of LEGO) - optimistic, aren't I?

The effectiveness of establishing ranges or more granular categories
for Audience is questionable at this time. The above four top-level
categories should adequately cover the majority of age-related
filtering needs, while remaining simple enough to ensure adoption
among content providers.

Are we going to give guidelines what's what?  Also, I think the NYFOL
might be misplaced, if the main reason for this tag is "age related
filtering".  Unless, of course, you want to make it NYKFOL, NYAFOL,
NYFOL... :)

===============================================
* CALENDAR (One only per item/entry)
  Attributes
    - Startdate
    - Enddate

One of the most important additions IMO, and one which may garner the
attention of the world outside LEGO enthusiasts. A successful
implementation of the Calendar extension has massive potential to
revolutionize distributed content publishing (he said modestly).

See samples below for Calendar implementation, as the attributes are different
than other elements.

===============================================
* GEOGRAPHY (One only)
  - TBD

This is a very handy concept that requires more investigation. If
used, the list of geographies should be from an existing W3C standard,
should one exist with enough granularity to be useful.

Are we sure we want to limit it to one only?  That pushes the burden
onto the filters...  For instance, say there's an event in Boston.  The
GEOGRAPHY tag would say something like "US-MA-Boston", let's assume.
That makes it easy for filters who care about US only events (US-*), MA
only events (US-MA-*), or events in Boston.  But what about our remote
NELUGgers, who live in NH?  Now, their filter will look something like
"US-(MA|NH)-*"...  And the poor WAMALUGgers would have something like
"US-(DC|VA|MD)-*".  Starts to get messy.

Of course, if we push it to the publishers, the same problem exists,
except now the work is done only once (the publisher needs to figure out
the areas that would care), and not on each subscriber's end.

Perhaps a solution would be to have a system that can tell you how far
an event is from you.  If the GEOGRAPHY was just a lat/long, I could
easily subscribe to events that are within 50 miles of my home, etc.

IMPLEMENTATION:

Regardless of whether RSS or Atom specs are used, the implementation
should always be pretty much the same. Below are two samples - note
that the use of the namespace declaration is for example purposes
only, and may not be well-formed XML.

Can we pick a different tag for LENNI?  Even 'lenni' would be better, I
don't think I saw other namespaces tagged with caps?

...

I welcome comments on this proposal, and whether you feel it merits
implementation in both RSS and Atom or not. Personally, after
reviewing the side-by-side samples, I am thinking it might be most
feasible to simply say LENNI can be implemented on both RSS v2.0 and
Atom style XML feeds. Software developers can then decide which they
choose to support - or both, which would be the best of both worlds.

Yah, maybe both would be easiest on our end - punt the decision to the
developers.  It does make the spec more complex, especially in future
versions, when the "staleness" of RSS might get in our way.

But if it's either do both, or do just RSS, I'll take both :)

On Tue, Aug 31, 2004 at 06:31:06AM +0000, Tim Courtney wrote:
CAD -- can't believe you missed that one. :P

Not sure - is CAD a theme?  It's more of a general umbrella of
activities.  I mean, is "Inventory" a theme?  I don't think so?

Perhaps we need to separate the two - have "Theme", which is a selection
from a predetermined list, and make use of the "Category" for more
general things, like "CAD", "Publishing", etc.

On Tue, Aug 31, 2004 at 11:01:44AM +0000, Larry Pieniazek wrote:
"SNOT" and "Micro" are technically not themes, and Mosaic/Sculpture
also skirt this category; however, they are arguably important
enough to merit their own Theme entry. As updated Themes become
prevalent in LEGO Communities, they can be added to the LENNI
namespace.

I wonder if there ought to be a way to denote that a theme is fan
created? Ala PCS or Sea Monkeys? Also, is there merit in allowing
hierarchy (Space/PCS or Castle/Forestmen for example)?

That may be excessive complexity, not sure.

Especially if the theme remains a selection from a "fixed list".  A punt
would be to say "put PCS in the keywords", but that's really not a good
solution.

--
Dan Boger
dan@peeron.com



Message has 1 Reply:
  Re: LENNI Additions to RSS/Atom spec - preliminary proposal
 
(...) I did an hour of surfing today, and came up with a few things, none of which really strikes me as being perfect. The most easily-implemented regional listing is the ISO-3166-2 standard: (URL) (Click "Local ISO codes" next to the country in (...) (20 years ago, 1-Sep-04, to lugnet.publish)

Message is in Reply To:
  LENNI Additions to RSS/Atom spec - preliminary proposal
 
This is a followup to last week's initial LEGO Enthusiast News Network Initiative (LENNI) posting, located at (URL) is a preliminary proposal for additions to an XML RSS/Atom feed, specifically for LEGO-related content. This is based on previous (...) (20 years ago, 31-Aug-04, to lugnet.publish, lugnet.general)  

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