Jon Udell: What is standard Internet metadata?

Jon's Radio : Jon Udell's Radio Blog

Updated: 8/6/2002; 12:30:44 AM.

Note: Jon's Radio has moved to InfoWorld

Wednesday, May 08, 2002

What is standard Internet metadata?

Commenting on Paul Prescod's rules for Extreme Web Services, Sam Ruby writes:
Note also that "RDF is the standard for metadata" is slipped into #5. Smooth, eh? Metadata is a broad term. I also consider XML Schema metadata. [Sam Ruby]

And many other things including HTTP headers, parts of URLs, RFC822 headers, HTML doctitles. You can't have it both ways. If the REST folks want to call the SOAP people architecture astronauts who don't appreciate the simple things that made the Web great, then they probably ought to play that RDF pedal a little more softly.

10:41:55 PM

Archive retitler bugfix

I found and fixed a small bug in the archive-page retitling script described in a recent column. The following line:

regex.subst ("#title .+", "#title " + scratchpad.title + "\r\n" + scratchpad.archiveFile, @scratchpad.archiveFile);

should instead be:

regex.subst ("#title [^\r\n]+\r\n", "#title " + scratchpad.title + "\r\n", @scratchpad.archiveFile);

There were two problems. First, the dot-plus didn't mean match-to-next-newline as I had assumed, but rather match the whole multiline string of metadata grabbed from the file. Second, I was erroneously including that whole string in the replacement. This had the effect of stacking up titles in cases of more than one titled item per day, like so:

#title3
#title2
#title1

It wasn't a bad problem, because #title3 was the one I wanted, and that's the one Radio used. Anyway, fixed.

10:24:39 PM

Two flavors of RSS channel

Jenny's poll reminded me that RSS truncation shouldn't be an either/or choice. So I'm experimenting with some extra tags in my RSS feed.

The basic feed continues to send truncated descriptions. It adds a [fullitem] tag that has the complete text of the item. Of course no newsreaders use this yet. But I want to make sure that sending this extra tag won't cause problems. In Radio it seems not to, but I want to see if AmphetaDesk, NewsIsFree, Meerkat, and others are OK with it. If not, please let me know!

I've also added a [pubtime] tag, just to see if I can. As Sam Ruby keeps pointing out in another context, extra information shouldn't be a problem so long as the required core elements are present.

There's also a long-format feed which is just an XSLT transform of the basic feed. In that version, [description] is the complete item, and [blurb] is the truncated description. So now there's choice. You can subscribe to either the basic feed with short descriptions, or the long-format feed with long ones.

The next step would be to experiment with the news aggregator. Given a feed containing both short and long items, it ought to be possible to let the user toggle between them, perhaps even on a per-channel basis.
8:46:07 AM