[ghns] Back from Spain

[Thomas Wood]

Aaron J. Seigo wrote:
> On Sunday 05 March 2006 15:39, Thomas Wood wrote:
>>  I think RSS is a little limited for sharing wallpapers anyway, and I am
>>  going to start looking at Atom for use on art.gnome.org. It would be
>>  interesting to see if it would be possible for the GHNS spec to be
>>  compatible with Atom. (Adding GHNS namespace to Atom to add extended
>>  information for example...)
>>
>>  Do any of the GHNS developers have any opinions about this? It seems to
>>  be Atom is a very flexible framework, and it would be nice to be able to
>>  use an already widely adopted standard.
> 
> the trouble with standards is that there are so many of them. atom vs rss, 
> blah blah blah ;)

The thing that I liked about Atom was that it was possible to attach 
multiply "enclosure" tags to an item. This is useful for art.gnome.org 
because each Background often has several different resolutions. Atom 
also includes a "rights" tag, which can be used to convey copyright 
information (think license type). It also has separate published and 
updated elements.

> 
> personally, i don't see the win here. put up an atom/rss feed and throw up a 
> GHNS service for a proper downloading service. instead of trying to cram 
> $XML_SCHEMA into GHNS or vice versa, why not just use the tools for what they 
> are intended for and keep them simple and straightforward?
> 
> this will help make the code easier to maintain and the usage of GHNS more 
> straightforward IMO.

Atom will do 80% of what I need for art.gnome.org already. It'd be nice 
if we could agree on a name space to extend that to 100%. After all, XML 
stands for eXtensible ;-)

We already have a list of tags defined in the GHNS schema, so I suspect 
it wouldn't be hard to pick the ones needed to make Atom a complete 
solution. This could either be done by pulling GHNS closer to Atom 
(eliminating duplicated tags in the GHNS spec), or by pulling Atom 
closer to GHNS (using the GHNS name space inside Atom). I don't really 
mind either way, but the advantage is that I don't need to maintain two 
separate "news" feeds since Atom is already supported by most news readers.

-Thomas