Government Web Standards
Talk:Syndicated feed standard
- Standard:3.1 Documents validate to published formal grammars
- Recommendation 6.1.9 Media releases and consultation documents available as an RSS feed
Formats have moved on since RSS 1.0 was chosen by government and it is time for an update. Some questions to consider:
- Do we need to choose a single syndication standard for government or should we accept all common formats (ie RSS 1.0, RSS 2.0 and Atom)?
- Do we need a common standard for syndication metadata and, if so, what would it look like?
- What else would it take in order for all agencies to be able to submit their news and consultations (as recommended in Recommendation 16.1.9 Media releases and consultation documents available as an RSS feed)?
Please add your comments/suggestions/discussion to this page.
Background information for these questions can be found on the Talk:Syndicated feeds background information page. Please add additional supporting information to that page.
My 2c is that we should consider moving RSS 2.0 and Atom from 'future consideration' to 'recommended' status in the e-GIF and possibly downgrade RSS 1.0 from 'recommended' to 'deprecated'.
We would then need to agree on common metadata elements for feeds to ensure interoperability of the content within the feeds.
--AnneMarie Curtis 09:46, 30 October 2007 (NZDT)
I completely agree, both RSS 2.0 and Atom have been around for a significant amount of time now and should be moved to 'recommended' status.
--Wantok 08:38, 26 November 2007 (NZDT)
"Do we need to choose a single syndication standard for government or should we accept all common formats (ie RSS 1.0, RSS 2.0 and Atom)?"
Only Atom is a IETF standard. Atom was nutted out through a long winded consensus process unlike rss2 which was announced to the world as a finished product by its single Author.
"Do we need a common standard for syndication metadata and, if so, what would it look like?"
Metadata is already built into Atom. updated, published, author, contributors id, summary
Namespaced NZGLS geo metadata seems handy to signify that, this content applies to this agency and this locality
--Grant 08:03, 11 December 2007 (NZDT)
Here's A List Apart's reasons for using RSS2 only ...
Why RSS 2.0 only? Sure, there are other syndication formats out there, including some that aren’t even called RSS. And there are companies that will generate multiple formats from a single RSS feed. We thought about all that. And decided that RSS 2.0 was a standard, and that it was better to choose a standard and stick with it than to contribute to the fragmentation of the world-wide digital brainosphere.
Anthony Hawkins 09:31, 1 February 2008 (NZDT)
I suggest you take a look at why Atom was created.
RSS2 was/is so inconsistent that the main authors of the 'feed validator', Sam Ruby and Mark Pilgrim became the main proponents of the move to construct a better, more rigorous Web Feed standard that at least could be tested for compliance against a validator. Atom since then has managed to garner the support of some of the best web luminaries in its process to become an IETF standard.
RSS2 has not been rigorously developed by any formal open Web Standards standards body or forum. RSS2 as a document markup format is not consistently machine processable even though most Feed readers make a good hack of it. RSS2 is merely popular in the way cheddar cheese is popular. IMHO I don't think NZ govt should mandate it's use
Grant 14:55, 4 February 2008 (NZDT)
Thanks for that feedback Grant - I guess the underlying question here is 'should NZ govt be mandating a particular syndication format?' What are the benefits for NZ govt of doing this? Especially given, like you say, 'most feed readers make a good hack of it'.
AnneMarie Curtis 17:28, 19 February 2008 (NZDT)
Should any web feed syndication format be mandated since that any feed reader can hack almost web feed syndication format?
My opinion is that RSS2 should not be mandated. RSS2 markup leads to inconsistent machine processing, so that 'links' will sometimes fail (for a client) and 'title' data will sometimes be lost. RSS2 is also not bi-culture appropriate as IRIs are simply not supported. As it stands RSS2 is a closed under specified specification not open for revision. While this might be ok for Joe Blogs publishing his/her personal blog I do not think it's ok for NZ govt. agencies when there is an IETF standard that simply does not have these problems.
A 2nd answer to the question is that it's not just about feed readers but about publishing syndicated content. With the publishing of Atom formated content we get each entry tagged with a readable title and maybe with a good summary. We get cleanly defined machine processable content which is always timestamped, always has unique ids, and can be categorised, where Hyperlinks just work ....
With such meta-data aggregation/movement/archiving/data-mining of feed content is simple.
Atom is more than a web feed format, it's also a publishing protocol. Atom Publishing Protocol (APP)" is a simple HTTP-based protocol for creating and updating web resources". As a side effect of APP we get something which moves beyond syndicating content on existing websites... a convenient generic way of dealing with collections of resources. "Atom is the general purpose collection idiom that XML has never had before. XML has been about trees, not collections".
Grant 09:13, 20 February 2008 (NZDT)
The State Services Commission has published an updated feed standard based on Atom. Currently in draft for consultation until 13th August 2008, this will replace the 2003 e-GIF RDF specification for NZ Government feeds.
The document and other resources are at
http://research.elabs.govt.nz
Specifically, http://research.elabs.govt.nz/nz-govt-feed-standard/
--Matthew Ross 16:39, 22 July 2008 (NZST)
