ESF
Are you also fed up with the continuing war between RSS 0.9* and 1.0 and 2.0 and whatever else they invent today?
Me too.
So today I invented the Epistula Syndication Format. ESF. It isn’t XML. It isn’t RDF. It’s just data. Quick, reliable, and I’m never going to change the spec in such a way as to break the previous version. Ever. Promise. It’s staying that way. Even Shelly could use it :-)
ESF, the Epistula Syndication Format, is a really simple format for publishing links to the last few items on any given topic, on any given website. The format is as follows:
Mime Type
ESF should be served as text/plain
Comments:
Every line starting with a “#” is a comment.
Metadata:
From the start of the file (excluding comments) begins the meta data, in the format field, tab, data. Valid fields are:
- title
- the title of the feed/site
- contact
- a contact address for the site or the feed, must be in the form “
email_address (Name)” - link
- The home page of the feed’s data.
The end of the data is signified by a newline charecter.
All metadata is optional. Two newlines in sucession designate the end of the metadata, then the content begins.
Content is of the form “date(tab)title(tab)link(newline)”. End of file marks the end of content, date is in Unix timestamp (seconds since the epoch) format. Clarification: Links work in the same way as browser-links do. If you define a scheme (http://) they are absolute, otherwise relative)
Example Feed:
(Example feeds can be found at http://www.aquarionics.com/meta/, all the feeds ending in .esf are ESF feeds :-))
#Aquarionics Newsfeed, in Episula Syndication Feed format (ESF) #http://www.aquarionics.com/nodes/index.php?name=esf title Aquarionics contact aquarion@aquarionics.com (Aquarion) link http://www.aquarionics.com/ 1032882396 Pong http://www.aquarionics.com/index.php?id=739 1032649452 Death. http://www.aquarionics.com/index.php?id=731 1032614009 Which Blogging Tool? http://www.aquarionics.com/index.php?id=729 1032329703 Interesting Weblogs http://www.aquarionics.com/index.php?id=722 1032267337 Chocolate http://www.aquarionics.com/index.php?id=720 1032258909 Do spiders make chutney? http://www.aquarionics.com/index.php?id=719 1032199993 Memeping http://www.aquarionics.com/index.php?id=716
No readers yet exist. As they do, and I’m told about them, they will be listed here.
Update as of 2002-09-26:
Freaky responce, I have to say. Part of which is Jonathon Delacour creating an icon for it for it. See http://weblog.delacour.net/archives/000712.html
More updates: Now is there a Perl ESF Module. MT still doesn’t support it, though :)
2004-01-21
And it goes on. Kevin released the Epoch mod for Movable Type which allows MT users to make proper ESF feeds, the reader R3R is designed with ESF in mind (And does what my own RSS reader does not, and supports it. This is kind of strange, but never mind)
00:00 on September 25th, 2002
No. It remains the same, the world evolves to fit.
Essay on this coming soon.
00:00 on September 25th, 2002
Make it support ISO date format as well?
20020925-191500 is pretty easy to work from…
00:00 on September 25th, 2002
According to Mark, it doesn’t. I’m working on this :-)
00:00 on September 27th, 2002
How should tab characters in titles be encoded/escaped?
00:00 on September 28th, 2002
EPS Parser Module for Perl
,
EPS test. I suck at Perl, but hey, it’s something :)
20:23 on June 19th, 2003
Shouldn’t it be tabs, not spaces? Possibly a nefarious text editor at work there.
22:30 on June 19th, 2003
Yes, cutting and pasting into a web form isn’t the way to do it, I found. Should be right now.?
01:38 on June 20th, 2003
Well I would say ask Aquarion, but his feeds get the contact field the wrong way round. It’s clear the world needs an ESF validator.
08:29 on June 20th, 2003
*Blink* So they do.
Fixed
10:37 on June 27th, 2003
There is no need to escape tab characters because only the first tab character have a special meaning. The format is “field, tab, data” where data could be anything except for newline characters. To talk in PHP: list($field, $data) = explode(“\t”, $line, 2);
06:03 on July 3rd, 2003
> More updates: Now is there a Perl ESF Module. MT still doesn’t support it, though :)
would you like it to?
10:30 on October 10th, 2004
The download links on the Wiki were broken for a long time, sorry for that! Everything is back to normal now, and a plugin for WordPress 1.2 is on its way
07:51 on April 28th, 2005
I’ll install a plugin to make my blog support it, the more feeds the merrier!
20:22 on May 12th, 2005
Yeah, that\’s the one I was talking about :)
09:57 on January 8th, 2006
Where I can buy book about ESF for low price?