RebelGeekz:

“Now, let’s play a game, try to come up with a better alternative and then we keep improving it.”

I’ll happily play along - in fact I have a format brewing in the back of my head.

Right now thought, all I have time for is a couple of quick comments:

• First, it’s difficult to tell what’s really going on without some knowledge of the metadata surrounding the attributes.  Like, which are required and which are optional?
• Second, for my part I’m not sure I want to stuff all the data in attributes.  My understanding of XML best practices is to keep metadata in the attributes and data in elements.
• Last (for now) I’m not partial to the parent-cild relationship here.  It mean that every time I want to record an item I need to record a feed.   But not all of my attention items are in feeds, and I’d also rather just reference a feed for an item when there is a feed (instead of constructing that feed node again), and keep the meta-data about the feed separate.  It’ll cut down on the bits going over the wire quite a bit.

Now that’s all negative stuff.  Here’s a positive one: I like a lot of the data in this format - it’s closer to what I actually want to capture.  One innovative element is the link child of item - that would be a nice bit to capture, and in cases where I’m too lazy to vote for an item an application could use an algorithm to vote for me (like if I clicked on it, vote for it - it would then be my responsibility to vote against stuff I clicked but didn’t like).

Counter-proposal, perhaps tomorrow.

technorati tags: attention data