[whatwg] Removing the need for separate feeds

Ian Hickson ian at hixie.ch
Thu May 21 23:01:51 PDT 2009


One of the use cases I collected from the e-mails sent in over the past 
few months was the following:

   USE CASE: Remove the need for feeds to restate the content of HTML pages
   (i.e. replace Atom with HTML).

   SCENARIOS:
     * Paul maintains a blog and wishes to write his blog in such a way that
       tools can pick up his blog post tags, authors, titles, and his
       blogroll directly from his blog, so that he does not need to maintain
       a parallel version of his data in a "structured format." In other
       words, his HTML blog should be usable as its own structured feed.

   REQUIREMENTS:
     * Parsing rules should be unambiguous.
     * Should not require changes to HTML5 parsing rules.

I've attempted a first cut at the above here:

   http://www.whatwg.org/specs/web-apps/current-work/#atom

It doesn't collect the blogroll or the blog post tags yet, mostly because 
I'm not sure how to do that. Any suggestions of improvements are naturally 
welcome.

-- 
Ian Hickson               U+1047E                )\._.,--....,'``.    fL
http://ln.hixie.ch/       U+263A                /,   _.. \   _\  ;`._ ,.
Things that are impossible just take longer.   `._.-(,_..'--(,_..'`-.;.'


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