Name
mod_aggregation
Synopsis
The
Aggregation
module plays a small but useful part in the life cycle of information
passing through the Web. It allows news aggregators, such as Meerkat,
Snewp, and so on (all covered in Chapter 12) to
display the sources of their items. These services gather
item
s from many other sources and group them by
subject. mod_aggregation
allows us to know where
they originated.
This, of course, works over generations: as long as the
mod_aggregation
elements are respected, a Meerkat
feed that uses a Snewp item
from a Moreover feed
that is itself an aggregation (for example) will still have the
original source credited. As long as the
mod_aggregation
elements are left in place, the
information is preserved. There is not, as yet, any feature for
describing an aggregation history, however. You only know about the
primary source.
Aggregators are the only people generating these elements — if you’re building such a system, consider including them. The act of parsing such elements, however, is good for everyone. One can easily envisage an HTML representation of an RSS 1.0 feed with a “link via x” section. This is already done manually by many weblog owners, so why not include the feature in your RSS parsing scripts?
Namespace
mod_aggregation
takes ag
: as its
prefix and http://purl.org/rss/modules/aggregation
as its identifying URI. Therefore, an RSS 1.0 root element that uses
it should look like this:
<?xml version="1.0"?> <rdf:RDF xmlns:rdf="http://www.w3.org/1999/02/22-rdf-syntax-ns#" ...
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