James Tauber's Blog 2004/08/14
OPML Sharing and Polling Security
Prompted by Scoble, I uploaded my OPML to Dave Winer's OPML sharing site.
You should too!
I was just about to comment that it would be nice—along the lines I was suggesting in Aggregation Versus Hosting—if you could just provide a URI for your OPML and have the site pull it in on a regular basis.
Well it turns out you can. Thank you Dave!
Now if Bloglines would take the same URI (via polling plus the ability to force a reload) I'd be even happier.
Making a resource available for polling rather than uploading it to a variety of sites raises some additional security issues. What if I wanted to make my resource available to aggregator.example.com but no one else? One possibility would be to submit the URI along with a username and password that aggregator.example.com could use with Basic Auth to retrieve the URI. Alternatively, and more securely, aggregator.example.com could publish a public key and I could configure my site to encrypt the resource using that public key whenever aggregator.example.com requested it. I wonder if either would fly.
by jtauber : Created on Aug. 14, 2004 : Last modified Feb. 8, 2005 : (permalink)
Maximizing the Differences
OpenFlow mostly agreed with my post on XML and RDF but took issue with me on one point that I think was a misunderstanding.
When I said "the default serialization of RDF as XML should not be the principal way RDF is interchanged", I wasn't against serializing as XML. I meant that a generic RDF to XML serialization isn't necessarily going to result in the optimal XML schema.
XML should be the way RDF is expressed but I don't think a single (or even small handful of) generic mappings is going to give you nearly as nice XML as if you tweaked the mapping for the particular ontology.
OpenFlow suggests "A canonical way of expressing RDF would probably go a long way in minimizing the differences (and flame wars) between RDF and XML" but I don't want to minimize the differences between RDF and XML because I think they serve a very different purpose. I'm trying to reduce the overlap in order to minimize the flame wars.
One advantage of the RDF ontology + mapping + XML schema approach over the RDF ontology + generic XML serialization is people who don't like the generic RDF/XML serialization don't have to use it; they can invent their own XML schema.
Furthermore, we RDFers don't have to lament over every "non-RDF" XML schema developed. We can hope that the developers of individual XML schemas would provide a mapping to an RDF ontology, but if they don't, someone else always can.
by jtauber : Created on Aug. 14, 2004 : Last modified Feb. 8, 2005 : (permalink)