Bill de hOra: Snowflake APIs

"...reduced variability at one layer allows for increased offerings with lower costs at higher layers."

It's a very good point (alluded to in your "Magnificent Seven" post as well). While much activity revolves around things like activity, social network apps, etc., there is so much to be gained from a properly RESTful view of the web (guided, I'd say, by the example of Atom/AtomPub) at more mundane levels: simply considering how any web page might be "syndicated" forces a real separation of content from presentation and at least opens the possibilty of a write-back story where there previously had been none. It make perfect sense for the digital library/open access repository world in higher ed. (the area in which I work), yet we are still not quite getting that yet. And while we think of Facebook/MySpace as the "use cases" for social platforms, the opportunities they open up in the areas of education (which is, or should be, all about creating new means of access for and repurposing of content) could be tremendous.

As far as extensibility goes, my own preference would be to see how far we can take simple Atom itself, allowing it to work as it does already in browsers and feed readers (of course we *do* need a solid media extension), and start looking to atom:category as a built-in extension point for all sorts of RDF-ish possibilities. I prefer a controlled explosion of diversity there (based on @scheme "ontologies") than an uncontrolled explosion of extensions/namespaces that may or may not be commonly adopted.

Peter Keane

January 9, 2009 at 6:21 a.m.

Great post. re: "RDF is worth learning for a different reason..." The same goes for REST.

Of all the topics I've explored and experimented with over my time working on web applications those two have had the greatest pay-off in terms of changes of my development as an architect and an engineer.

Leigh Dodds

January 9, 2009 at 9:34 a.m.

ok first of all that is the best abbreviation ever and the only thing that would improve it if we had
Hypermedia As The Engine of Uniform State
instead.

bryan

January 9, 2009 at 11:40 a.m.

Links In Content - best acronym ever! You can tell people to LIC it.

Rob Koberg

January 9, 2009 at 1:53 p.m.

Bill,

Very nice post that brings up a few thoughts -

* Atom is a powerful format for four reasons: it recognizes that linking exists for reasons that have nothing to do with web page display, it provides a consistent mechanism for providing categorization, it can serve as a transport protocol for content as well as being reflective of content summaries, and it is fundamentally tied into a RESTful view of the world.

* I ultimately expect AtomPub to dominate as the de facto publishing mechanism by 2014, following a Cambrian extinction event of nearly all other publishing APIs that is already underway. AtomPub is still rough around the edges, but I also see it being quietly adopted at all the right places. The emergence of XML Databases and XQuery will have a lot to do with that as well, and that will unfold over the next two years.

* Prediction for 2010 - RDFa + Atom will be established as a W3C working group. The central problem of mixed namespace content (such as GeoRSS) is precisely as Dare described - there is no clean or effective mechanism for either discovering an ontology or processing it. One possible solution to this is to establish an ontology link to an RDF/OWL description at either the feed or the entry level of an Atom document and then treat domain specific extensions on Atom as being discoverable rather than fixed. If functionality exists within the user agent for a given extension element, then that functionality is invoked. If not, then the discover process at least provides a consistent mechanism for establishing the meaning and documentation of the elements in question, and possibly would include a transformation, service or similar resource to generate the appropriate response. This becomes preferable to ignoring them outright.

* Until SemWeb recognizes that syndication feeds will end up carrying the bulk of the services within the next decade, it will continue to be a voice in the wilderness. They two HAVE to be linked in some fashion, because the bulk of all semantics on the web is increasingly being tied up in syndication, not web pages.

Anyway, once again, you have a very thought-provoking post.

Kurt Cagle

January 10, 2009 at 9:33 a.m.

@Rob "You can tell people to LIC it."

The original was Links in Content are King :)

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