Re: [Slashcode-development] RSS 1.0

[Rael D. <ra...@or...>]

Howdy,

First, I should apologise for my delayed response on this -- bad, bad
procmail!

On Mon, 4 Dec 2000, Chris Nandor wrote:

> OK, here is a list of the data for stories that we have available,
> that we might want to put in to RSS 1.0 files.  I listed pretty much
> all the data for stories, and just a few things for site.  Comments
> welcome.

Chris, could you provide a dump of a typical record so as to see what type
of data is in each of these fields?  What further constraints are
there in terms of what fields are likely to / will always / will _not_
appear together?  For example, will there ever be a case when topic and
section are both appropriate?  Which fields have constrained possible
values?

> The purpose of this is to put these items into available RSS fields,
> either in the RSS core in Dublin Core, or in our own Slash XML module.

Aside from title, link, and description (corresponding to title, url,
introtext, I believe) nothing else goes into the core as far as items are
concerned.  As for Dublin Core, there are various possible mappings you
can do; for example: topic or section or a combinaton of the two in
dc:subject, author in dc:creator, date in dc:date ... see my sample
Slashcode RSS 1.0 document example below.

> >From here, we could then move on to defining fields for comments
> and users, and any other data we want to search on, for the purpose
> of returning search data to users and to any other searches we want
> to enable.

You need to determine what's necessary/useful from the rest of the fields,
and it makes sense at least initially to put these into a slashcode module
... again, see my sample below.  At some point you might find that a
more generalised module exists to house some of this, but that's not the
case right now.  Fact is that widespread use of an ad-hoc module will
heavily influence any such generalised module.

---

Ok, so first a little mapping between the fields you've provided and
the RSS core (rss), Dublin Core (dc), and Syndication (syn) modules, 
and a made-up Slashcode (slash) module...

> site
> ----
> URL                    rss:channel->rss:link
> name                   rss:channel->rss:title
> language               rss:channel->dc:language
> slogan (description)   rss:channel->rss:description
> contact email          rss:channel->dc:creator

> stories
> -------
> URL (story ID)         rss:item->rss:link
> title                  rss:item->rss:title
> author                 rss:item->dc:creator
> section                rss:item->dc:subject
> topic                  rss:item->dc:subject (either/or/combined)
> department             rss:item->slash:department
> number of comments     rss:item->slash:comments
> date                   rss:item->dc:date

> other (probably not useful, or should not be included):
> introtext              rss:item->rss:description
> bodytext               (more content than metadata, but up to you)
> writestatus            what is this?
> hits                   rss:item->slash:hits
> displaystatus          what is this?
> commentstatus          what is this?
> hitparade              what is this?
> relatedtext            sounds interesting... what is it?
> extratext              sounds interesting... what is it?

I'm afraid I don't know what some of the above are or how useful they
would be, but they'd probably be best in a Slashcode module if deemed
useful/interesting.

If section and story are mutually exclusive, then have the appropriate
one be dc:subject.  If they co-occur, have the most descriptive one
be dc:subject and the one more for internal use by slash:{topic/section}.

---

The following sample template uses ${} to indicate the fields I've slotted
in as mapped above...

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="iso-8859-1"?>
<rdf:RDF
  xmlns:rdf="http://www.w3.org/1999/02/22-rdf-syntax-ns#"
  xmlns:dc="http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/"
  xmlns:slash="http://slashcode.net/rss/elements/1.0/"
  xmlns="http://purl.org/rss/1.0/"
>

 <channel rdf:about="${site_url}">
   <title>${site_name}</title>
   <link>${site_url}</link>
   <description>${site_slogan}</description>
   <dc:rights>Copyright 2000, ${site_name}</dc:rights>
   <dc:creator>${site_contact_email}</dc:publisher>
   <dc:publisher>${site_name}</dc:publisher>
   <dc:language>${site_language}</dc:language>

   <items>
    <rdf:Seq>
     <rdf:li rdf:resource="${story_url}" />
     ...
     <rdf:li rdf:resource="${story_url}" />
    </rdf:Seq>
   </items>

 </channel>

 <item rdf:about="${story_url}">
   <title>${story_title}</title>
   <link>${story_url}</link>
   <description>${story_intro_text}</description>
   <dc:creator>${story_author}</dc:creator>
   <dc:subject>${story_section}: ${story_topic}</dc:subject>
   <dc:language>${story/site_language}</dc:language>
   <dc:date>${story-date}</dc:date>
   <dc:format>text/html</dc:format>
   <slash:department>${story_department}</slash:department>
   <slash:comments>${story_number_of_comments}</slash:comments>
   <slash:hits>${story_hits}</slash:hits>
   ...
 </item>

 ...

</rdf:RDF>

Again, a template will be much easier to refine with a sample record or 
three from your database.  And, of course, quite a bit of this needs
only a little artistic license.

Hope this provides a useful start.

Rael

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