[Peerpress-main] Anyone alive out there?

[Nick Lothian]

> about what's required to make things work. My current goal would be to
work
> out something that would let people exchange news stories reasonably
quickly.
> The rest can wait.

Agreed

> this. Specifically, RSS 1.0 has done a lot of the work for us.

Although the RDF syntax is a dog.

>
> 1) Define an XML format for a response to a query of the type "What new
items
> do you have since <date>". It should list all the newsitems in a format
that
> specifies the date, headline, taxonomy, licensing terms, URL to get the
full
> item, and possibly other data (to be discussed). It seems to me that RSS
1.0
> fills this role very well, although I haven't finished reading up. The
good
> thing is that RSS1.0 supports extension modules (they already have a
proposed
> one for Slash-specific data). So whatever we need in the summary format
that
> RSS1.0 doesn't support out of the box, we can add into a module.
>

Yes. The modularity of RSS is nice.

> We should discuss this more. The levels do need to be clearly defined, so
> that people can filter on it, and auto-publish.
>

Yes. Auto-publishing is very, very important.

>
> 2) Define an XML format for a single item's full data. This might be a
little
> more work, since RSS1.0 doesn't currently do this in a very good way. We
> might want to use XHTML1.0, or possibly a subset of it. It needs to
include
> roughly the text markup functionality of XHTML, some paragraph-level
markup,
> possibly simple tables, and have functions for linking to related media
(with
> anchor points in the text, much like HTML3.2's <fig> element). It would be
> fairly easy to draw up our own format here, since we can just borrow bits
> from other formats (or, alternately, just use the different formats
through
> namespaces, but that would be a little bit too patchwork-like for my
tastes).
>

How about XHTML-Basic or whatever it is called? I haven't looked at it at
all, but I suspect it might be an easier starting point that full XHTML


> The HTTP transfer should only be one of several possible ways to
participate
> in Peer Press, and it's the first just because it's the simplest to
> implement. In the future, I'd like to see something like SOAP used for the
> same purpose.
>

A SOAP server would be a very good thing.
> Basically, I just dropped all the fancy functionality for this proposal.
It'd
> go into 2.0, in my opinion. The advantage is that we could get a number of
> member sites and show the utility, fast. This will in turn get more people
> available for adding the fancy features for 2.0.
>

Yes. Keep it simple for our first iteration would be a good philosposhy.

> Please give me your comments. I'm especially interested in what features
> should go into the XML DTDs for 1.0. I can crank out the XML DTDs myself,
> probably, and if needed, I can also code up a small PHP implementation of
the
> HTTP transfer system, backed by mySQL or Postgres. Feedback is welcome,
help
> even more so. When the proof of concept is working, I'd love to see Perl
and
> Python modules, Apache modules in C, etc. all implementing the same
scheme,
> as well as support patches for Slash, Squishdot, Scoop, and mod_virgule,
so
> it'll be easy to deploy this.

I'm doing Java stuff now, so I might be able to come up with a Java version
(time permitting).

Nick


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