Re: Is there an RSS feed for this list ?

* Ben Lund <b.lund@nature.com> [2005-02-07 12:52+0000]
> Hi Dan,
> 
> Dan Brickley wrote:
> >
> >Also there is some 
> >tension between a message-centric feed and a thread-centric feed. 
> >Currently each item is a thread, and the text for the item gets updated 
> >as the thread grows. But only new posts on new topics create new items
> >that show up to newsreaders.
> >
> 
> This behaviour used to annoy me, so a few months ago I knocked together 
> my own W3C mailing list to RSS service -- see for example 
> http://nurture.nature.com/ben/xslt/semantic-web.
 
Ah, interesting. I find both behaviours annoying, in different ways,
so it's good to have a contrast. I had a perl scraper that did 
something similiar (ie. post-centric not thread-centric) a while back. 
It's great until some tedious 1000-message thread on reification 
comes along and drowns out everything else. Perhaps the flat structure
of RSS/Atom isn't well suited to threaded discussion? There was 
some work around a 'threadml' or somesuch, as well as similar 
efforts related to Annotea, perhaps worth investigating?

> (This is not really a public service and is likely to disappear at some 
> point soon)

If it's useful, maybe we could take over hosting the XSLT (alongside 
our other non-official and could-disapear at any time too RSS service ;)

> The main features of this feed are:
> 
>  * Individual items are individual messages, not threads
>  * the item title is the email subject line

On that front, I tweaked Dom's XSLT yesterday to move from 
 n of m messages in thread: "Reification is fun"
to a notation that puts the thread info at the end, since that
works better in many UIs that truncate from the right.

>  * the sender's name is put in a dc:creator element
>  * there's no <description>
> 
> which leads to behaviour that is very email-like in some RSS readers -- 
> in particular the dc:creator is usefully displayed and the absence of a 
> <description> makes SharpReader and Thunderbird (at least) display the 
> full message from lists.w3.org instead.

Oh, interesting.

> I prefer this approach, and I can let you or anyone else have the XSL 
> behind it if you like.

If you could publish the XSLT that'd be great...

cheers,

Dan

Received on Monday, 7 February 2005 13:04:56 UTC