Doing the Necho Dance


July 8, 2003

There has been a lot of talk about Necho (formerly Echo) on the net so I decided to give it a try. From here, I generated a number of necho feeds for TNL.net:

While it is easy for me to generate quite a lot of feeds like this, I’m not yet convinced of the power of necho. I understand it’s still a draft but so far, there are still a number of things that I’m wondering about:

First to me is categorization. Obvious when looking at the example above. Yes, I could us a Dublin Core approach but I can also do that in RSS 1.0 so I don’t know where Necho works for me here.

Secondly, while this format works well for comments, on single user blogs like this one, the author for every entry is largely redundant.

Third, a consistency complaint: why not put the homepage at the top level too. It seems that the link covers where the feed is from but what about parentage (if it is a sub-category) ?

Fourth, where are the people? Sure, there can be an author, but what about the editor? what about the webmaster? Who’s responsible for the feed as a whole instead of its sub-elements?

Hopefully, those questions will be resolved soon.

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