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* Blogger -- had for a while, probably outdated.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

[mark]

I'm nervous about committing to do something like that. I'm more a believer in doing one thing really well (supporting Atom 100%) than having 75% support for Atom, Metaweblog API, Blogger, ...

Of course, if Atom isn't right, that statement could say supporting Metaweblog 100%, and ... you get the idea.

[foxfirefey]

What about supporting Atom 100% for our purposes and then supporting Metaweblog API just plain vanilla--enough for tools that only work with it and not Atom to be able to post? Tools like Delicious automatic posting or Posterous aren't going to know about fancy extensions we have or security extensions anyway; they just need to be able to post. And we can refuse to do anything on it until Atom is totally complete to our satisfaction.

[matgb]

A lot of my friends use Delicious scripts to get their bookmarks onto LJ, and that requires some seriously annoying hacking--getting it onto DW would be great, especially if it can be done without hacking and by converting whatever encoding they're outputting (we think it's western european) into UTF so posts are editable.

It'd be good if, for the simple purpose of allowing a client to post, we supported as many APIs as possible, as sometimes people are restricted on what they can install or use.

But full on editing, exporting and similar can be restricted to getting one decent API that works I suspect, as long as it looks fairly future proof.