The Automatic Discovery indeX (ADX).

<p>While I was out on my latest blogging hiatus, James Snell picks up on my response to earlier discussion by <a href="http://jeremy.zawodny.com/blog/archives/000967.html">Jeremy Zawodny</a> and <a href="http://www.dynamicobjects.com/d2r/archives/002324.html">Diego Doval</a> for developing a means of more robust RSS auto-discovery. He <a href="http://www.snellspace.com/blog/archivesNew/000065.html">writes</a>:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>As much as I like WSIL, it&#39;s pretty much officially dead. There is no further work going into it at all. So while I like <a href="http://www.timaoutloud.org/archives/000319.html">where Tim is going with this</a>, I think an alternative approach needs to be developed.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>He goes on to layout an example of a new alternate WSIL-like format he calls The Automatic Discovery indeX (ADX). </p>
<p>I agree with James and had suspected as much about WSIL. Given James employer is one of the authors of that spec I&#39;ll take it as fact. </p>
<p>I also like where he&#39;s gone with ADX. Like WSIL, it&#39;s more RESTful then UDDI (which just needs to die) and relatively simple and versatility enough to integrate numerous format pointers into one mechanism &#8211; SOAP, RSS, OPML, Atom and so on. This could also be used as a more robust and eventually a better formed and documented blogroll format.</p>
<p>While its a good start, ADX as James has detailed it I think it could use some refinement &#8211; mostly what I think are nits.</p>
<ul>
<li>Keep the tags all lowercase. Most formats do it that way so I see nothing gained be switching to proper case tags names.</li>
</ul>
<ul>
<li>I like the reuse of existing RSS modules such as Dublin Core however their use seems inconsistent. For instance James uses <code>dc:title</code>, but does not namespace <code>Description</code>. <code>Name</code> is also not namespaced and is about the equivalent of <code>dc:title</code>. I realize that James was transcribing <a href="http://www.timaoutloud.org/files/diego/index2.wsil">my WSIL examples</a>, but since this is a new format we might as well clean that up. Perhaps if Dublin Core is going (and should) play such an important roll those elements should just be folded into the syntax of this format?</li>
</ul>
<ul>
<li>In the spirit of Dublin Core, I&#39;d reuse this element sets naming conventions as much as possible. <code>Service.EndPoint</code> becomes <code>source</code> or perhaps the RSS standard <code>link</code> and so on. </li>
</ul>
<ul>
<li><code>IndexRef</code> should be expanded to allow for additional meta data to be associated with a reference to another index. For instance, what type of index is on the other side of this link? Another ADX? Or perhaps a UDDI directory? Or perhaps a OPML file. This is also an important allowance for blogroll use.</li>
</ul>
<ul>
<li>For argument sake, I&#39;d like to see an example of a WSDL file and a UDDI pointer. </li>
</ul>
<ul>
<li>Having a schema is good, but I think should be optional in an ADX document.</li>
</ul>
<ul>
<li>I&#39;m really hesitant of the DNS Service Discovery method because most users do not have the knowledge or access to implement such a thing.</li>
</ul>
<p>Mostly nits. So here is my riff on James&#39; original ADX proposal where I incorporate my feedback into an example:</p>
<pre>
&lt;?xml version=&quot;1.0&quot; encoding=&quot;UTF-8&quot;?&gt;
&lt;index
xmlns:dcterms=&quot;http://purl.org/dc/terms/&quot;
xmlns=&quot;urn:temporary:uri&quot;&gt;

  <title>News4Humans feedOnFeeds</title>
  <dcterms:modified>2003-09-12T23:45:37-00:00</dcterms:modified> 
  <source>http://news4humans.com/index.adx</source>
  <description>All the news preferred by highly evolved primates.</description>
  <language>en-us</language>
  <a href="mailto:<creator>newsfor&#64;news4humans&#46;com</creator>">&lt;creator&gt;newsfor&#64;news4humans&#46;com&lt;/creator&gt;</a>

  &lt;service&gt;
  &lt;name&gt;Latest News&lt;/name&gt;
  &lt;description&gt;A syndication feed of the 15 most recent news posts.&lt;/description&gt;
  &lt;source&gt;http://news4humans.com/feeds/index.xml&lt;/source&gt;
  &lt;format&gt;http://purl.org/rss/2.0/&lt;/format&gt;
  &lt;dc:modified&gt;2003-09-12T23:35:52-00:00&lt;/dcterms:modified&gt;
  &lt;/service&gt;

  &lt;service&gt;
  &lt;name&gt;Google Search&lt;/name&gt;
  &lt;description&gt;A SOAP interface to the Google search engine.&lt;/description&gt;
  &lt;format&gt;http://schemas.xmlsoap.org/wsdl/&lt;/format&gt; 
  &lt;source&gt;http://api.google.com/GoogleSearch.wsdl&lt;/source&gt; 
  &lt;/service&gt;

  &lt;!-- This was IndexRef &#8211;&gt;
  &lt;link&gt;
  &lt;title&gt;News4Humans Technology News Feeds&lt;/title&gt;
  &lt;description&gt;All the news preferred by highly evolved primates.&lt;/description&gt;
  &lt;source&gt;http://news4humans.com/tech.adx&lt;/source&gt;
  &lt;format&gt;urn:temporary:uri&lt;/format&gt;
  &lt;creator&gt;News4Humans&lt;/creator&gt;
  &lt;/link&gt;

 &lt;/index&gt;
</pre>
<p>Thoughts?</p>