Gadgetopia

FDML: At O’Reilly’s recent Foo Camp, some bloggers started fleshing out an idea for RSS feed self-discovery. Kind of like WDSL for RSS — you can get an XML document that explains all the feeds that a particular site offers.

“A working name for this effort is ‘FDML.’ The stands for Feed (Discovery / Directory / Detailing) Markup Language, depending on who you ask. ;-)

We did not get to the point where we created a concrete proposal, but here are some of the use cases that were discussed:

A single site provides a number of feeds that subset the information by subject; a single site provides a number of feeds that contain the same information, but in a variety of formats; a site provides a list of feeds that reside on a variety of hosts that are somehow related (example given was ‘Microsoft bloggers’); for extremely large lists, this information may need to be organized hierarchically.”