Protocols discussion

[foxfirefey]

Somebody brought up the topic of Really Simple Discovery and the Metaweblog API in dw_news, so now might be a good time to discuss protocols and our plans.

We currently have one bug to update the Atom publishing protocol and some bugs about updating our XML-RPC.

This is a post to collate discussion about:

1. What APIs do we currently support, and what state is our support for them in?
2. What APIs exist and what are their pros and cons? How popular are they with regards to services and clients that support them? How extensible are they, since we have unique posting metadata? Which ones would be a good fit to implement or improve? Where are good resources and documentation about them?
3. Where do we want to head with posting APIs, our overall goal?

Currently supported for posting

* Atom -- old version, needs upgrading desperately. We have a bug for this here. Once updated, we can start extending the protocol to support our custom features.
* Blogger -- had for a while, probably outdated.
* Flat API -- custom LJ flat API, destined for death.
* LJ XML-RPC -- custom LJ XML-RPC API, might be destined for death if we can adequately extend Atom

Other posting APIs

* Metaweblog -- this seems to be very popular as well. Apparently del.icio.us uses it to do auto-links-posting, for instance.
* RDS -- Really Simple Discovery -- this seems to be a generalized way to let clients know what protocols we support

Current supported and not supported data stuff

* FOAF -- http://foxfirefey.livejournal.com/data/foaf
* Interests data -- http://www.dreamwidth.org/misc/interestdata.bml?user=foxfirefey
* OPML -- http://www.dreamwidth.org/tools/opml.bml?user=foxfirefey
* Icon data -- http://foxfirefey.dreamwidth.org/data/userpics
* Fdata -- Don't have this yet and whether we will is still up in the air; discussion on this here; issues include whether or not we are showing data that isn't shown on the profile

Comments

[superluminal]

atom (both the feed format and the publishing protocol) is excellent. it's well-specified, flexible, extensible, RESTful, and with appropriate extensions could be used to provide programmatic access to more or less everything that currently has an api. atompub is useful for more than just posting entries -- there is a standards-track feed history extension that, if implemented, would make it easy to write journal backup tools, and imho atompub could be a good replacement for the fotobilder protocol if dw ever provides a photo-hosting service.

[foxfirefey]

This is really encouraging to hear. Not knowing it very well myself, I've been concerned because everybody and their dog seems to roll their own even with standards available, and I was worried that they were doing it because standards like Atom were insufficient. But it looks like Atom might be able to do it all on its own with extensions, and that would be wonderful!