Re: [emergency-msg] CAP Channels

[Art Botterell <acb@incident.com>]

At 6:19 AM -0400 8/14/03, Eliot Christian wrote:
>I'd like to raise a perspective on the work of a standards body as
>distinct from separate implementors.

I think this is a crucial point.  Our work should be to enable 
implementors by giving them high-quality options.  If we start trying 
to tell folks what they must or must not do, we'll have become our 
own enemy.

>Although RSS may not be fully mature yet, RSS is certainly widely
>deployed with lots of useful tools and experience. I would strongly
>advise the ERM TC against developing an alternative way to achieve
>what RSS does.

Most of the RSS tools and applications out there are focused on the 
syndication / dissemination of Web content to human users.  So I'm a 
little concerned that if one presented a CAP channel as an RSS feed, 
one might set oneself up for a lot of support calls from folks who 
fire up their RSS client and then have trouble making sense of the 
unformatted XML.

(Which isn't to say that an RSS feed of HTML-formatted messages 
derived from CAP messages might not be a good thing.  It's just that 
I'm thinking there may be a more general case here.)

So I set out to look at what elements might be required to support an 
indexed-retrieval application.  Once we're confident we know what 
information is required, we could certainly weigh the pros and cons 
of implementing them as an RSS module.  But I'm not sure it's 
necessary to pledge allegiance to RSS right at the outset.

The larger question is whether this is something we even want to 
address.  I built what I needed to support a particular 
implementation.  Then it occurred to me that this sort of arrangement 
is liable to pop up all over, and that it might be useful to offer... 
not mandate, just offer... a constructive suggestion about a common 
format for indexing simple "pull" channels.  But that's just my 
thought.

However, if someone wanted to make a motion during next week's call 
about exploring this project, we could take a vote and see what the 
collective wisdom of the group has to say.

- Art

PS - What I thought to be a pretty good RSS tutorial: 
<http://www.mnot.net/rss/tutorial/>