Slashdot Mirror
Where Are The RDFs?
zignig asks: "Sites have been publishing RDF's for a while (how many slashboxes are there now?). However I'm interested in knowing what sites put out RDF information. Is there a page or repository for currently available RDF feeds? If this information doesn't exist, then how can one find if a site has an RDF feed? It would be a good, low band width solution for Web news."
RDF is the Resource Description Framework, a W3C recommendation for making web content understandable by machines. Slashdot's own RDF is here. Cool, huh?!
As far as I know, it is not possible to know whether a site provides an RDF feed unless it is either driven by Slashcode (where the feed is provided at http://www.website.org/website.rdf as in the case of Slashdot) or Manila (where the RDF-like RSS feed is available from http://website.com/xml/rss.xml). xmltree.com is a good directory of various news feed formats, and there is an excellent weblog which is a Manila site, and so has an RSS feed here. While I'm sure some other content management systems provide feeds, I'm not aware of the default addresses for them.
I get so frustrated with this error...
:-)
The XML lingo you are looking for is RSS, which in the 0.9 format from Netscape was a form of RDF, then UserLand software decided to bastardise it into "Rich Site Summary", removing the RDFness. This is the most common format available now - RSS 0.91 (they've recently released 0.92). Luckily some very smart XML geeks saw this was a bad thing, and took RSS under their wings to create RSS 1.0, which *is* a form of RDF again.
But please, do not call RSS files "RDF". There are many forms that RDF can take. RDF is just a directed graph syntax in XML - its possibilities are endless and not limited to headline summaries. You are doing yourself an injustice by calling RSS "RDF", because I could not feed you my geneology graph in RDF format and expect you to be able to make headlines out of it.
You want RSS feeds, which you can find at http://www.xmltree.com/
Thank you and goodnight
Matt. Want XML + Apache + Stylesheets? Get AxKit.
When I add anything to qmail.org, I put a "NEW" or "UPDATED" image on it along with a datestamp. I've got a script that grovels through the page and sucks out anything with a datestamp. Then I sort them and write them into new.html. I use a similar script to write news.rdf. So as long as I'm careful to add the datestamp, I'm covered on both sides.
-russ
Don't piss off The Angry Economist