A few ideas I have put out there

[sull]

I've always wanted Dave to create a list for this purpose and I look
forward to the discourse.

A few casual efforts in the context of a resurgence and rebooting of
RSS that I have put out over the last few years...


inReplyTo RSS Namespace - Social conversation layer on top of RSS.
Very rudimentary meant to start a discussion on how to do things like
twitter @replies and basic comments or even private responses all as
RSS feeds at the core.
This forum was setup for any interested in chiming in and reading the
build-up of the ideas as well as prior art references:
http://xmlns.inreplyto.me

RSS Garden - A prototype of a minimalist content publishing system
where all data and functional structure is formatted as RSS feeds and/
or OPML. Presentation layer uses XSLT. CRUD is simple PHP layer.
Initial idea was to have front-end themes for RSS feeds. The app ONLY
generates RSS and OPML. It became a canvas for playing around with
other minimalist concepts or replicating common twitter-like features.
I forked rssgarden.com and have a slightly different version running
on apocalyp.to.

Cheers,

@sull

[Matt Mower]

On Wednesday, 18 April 2012 at 15:21, sull wrote:
> inReplyTo RSS Namespace - Social conversation layer on top of RSS.
> Very rudimentary meant to start a discussion on how to do things like
> twitter @replies and basic comments or even private responses all as
> RSS feeds at the core.

What a timely message. I am - right now - implementing this kind of functionality in our app, SmartFish.

We support both RSS2.0 and Atom syndication formats and I was looking for prior art in this area. I came across the Atom Threading extension spec:

http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc4685.txt

Among other things it defines an "in-reply-to" element. Our posts (we call them 'pebbles') use a SHA-1 hash as a unique identifier so ours are in the form:

<thr:in-reply-to ref="urn:uuid:5504D8DDA86E21C5CE62575B03A048F0B84F4E60"/>

The spec defines other behaviour that would support more complex threading functionality but this is all we need at the moment.

I'd be interested in your thoughts on this spec and interoperating in this area.

Kind regards,

Matt

--
http://mattmower.com/

[Matt Mower]

On Wednesday, 18 April 2012 at 15:21, sull wrote:

> inReplyTo RSS Namespace - Social conversation layer on top of RSS.
> Very rudimentary meant to start a discussion on how to do things like
> twitter @replies and basic comments or even private responses all as
> RSS feeds at the core.

Ah, belatedly I see you have come across the Atom threading extension and more besides. I've had a quick browse of the other links that you've posted to prior art. It's not clear to me that there's anything substantially better or more widely deployed than Atom threading. But if I'm wrong I'm certainly happy to look at other, more interoperable, approaches.

[Michael Sullivan]

Hi Matt,

I'm not sure that I consider Atom threading extension widely deployed.
For that reason and because I did not really want to mix in anything
Atom and was attempting to come up with a new simpler way to achieve
RSS replies/comments.

Thanks for your interest. What is SmartFish?

Sull