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Showing posts from August, 2004

Questions about embedding microcontent in an Atom feed

Imagine I wanted to write a new type of aggregator that could extract microcontent from feeds and then present that content in a way different from a normal 'news' aggregator. For example I might want to allow people to include 'event' information in their feeds and have my aggregator provide a calendar-like view onto all the events it had encountered. Does the Atom Syndication Format help me do that? Lets make the simplifying assumption that there is some well-defined, commonly-used way of representing a calendar event in XML with its own mime-type (lets postulate text/vcalendar+xml). I want to include both this 'structured' microcontent as well as my usual 'unstructured' ramblings into a single entry. My question is how is such hybrid content supposed to be included in an Atom feed? AFAICT entries in Atom may have multiple <content> elements. Thus you could include the calendar event information and the wordy bits in separate <content>