/blog

Back in November 2023, Dave Winer wrote: "I have an itch to make a simple chat program for a workgroup whose only output is a simple RSS 2.0 feed."

If that sounds familiar, I mentioned it in the context of the MyStatusTool (MST) created by Andy Sylvester, of which I made a test PHP version.

Dave is now scratching that itch by building (and testing) rss.chat:

We don't need anything more than RSS 2.0, OPML, Markdown, SQL and WebSocket. All very established in the web world, and remarkably only one was developed by a standards body.

Every user has an RSS feed, as does the whole community, and an OPML file lists everyone using it.

Obviously, any RSS reader can subscribe to any of the feeds but you would need to be using a client to post and reply.

On that topic, Dave has extended the source namespace with a couple of extra attributes:

• source:inReplyTo — an optional item level element that contains the URL of the parent post, and
• source:comments — an optional item level element that holds the number of comments and the URL of the comment feed.

source:inReplyTo acts in exactly the same way as mst:reply attribute I proposed in the MST namespace.

The parallels with blogging are obvious and I am looking at implementing both of these in my feed. This will, however, involve bringing back the live feed in addition to the daily.

I envisage external blogs being first class citizens in RSS networks in a similar way to how they are with micro.blog. I could also see the /blog & /reader integration becoming an rss.chat client.

I'm looking forward to seeing where this goes and exactly how far interop can be taken.