[tocml-list] TOCML on RSS 1.0?

[Curtis Duhn]

Tonight I started looking into what it would take to serve TOCML over RDF.
(http://www.dlib.org/dlib/may98/miller/05miller.html)

That led me to the RSS 1.0 spec
(http://groups.yahoo.com/group/rss-dev/files/specification.html)

, which can be extended using modules.
(http://groups.yahoo.com/group/rss-dev/files/Modules/modules.html)

It seems quite feasible to implement a hierarchy module for RSS 1.0 that
would give it all the functionality of TOCML.  There was some mention on
the rss-dev mailing list about trying to represent site maps in RSS, but
it appears that the idea was orphaned about a year ago.

Apparently sitemaps were a part of Netscape's original vision for RSS.
I'm perplexed as to why they got lost.  Here's a document from Dan
Brickley that apparently never quite turned into a spec:
http://rudolf.opensource.ac.uk/about/specs/sitemap.html

He mentioned that a working group within the Dublin Core effort was
working on a set of relationship types.  I'll have to check that out,
although I think XLink might be the preferred way to link these days.  Not
sure.

Interesting... Dan Brickley also had the idea of using the HTML 4.0 <link>
tag to point to the site map.  He wanted to go all-out and provide RDF
representations for all of the HTML 4.0 link types.  That goes way beyond
what I'm interested in doing with TOCML.

All in all, I'm quite excited at the moment about the idea of layering
TOCML as one or more namespaces on top of RDF, if not RSS 1.0.

BTW... RSS 1.0 is subtly different than the RSS 0.9x spec being driven
by Dave Winer and Userland software.  Apparently the two evolved in
parallel and can roughly be mapped to each-other, but they have now
forked.  I don't know what all the issues were.  I guess Dave doesn't like
namespaces or something.

Curtis Duhn
curtis@duhn.com