Syndicating XML
by Edd Dumbill
July 21, 2000
This XML.com Special Issue focuses on the role of XML in
syndication. XML's advantages in this area have been quickly recognized,
and syndication boasts some of the most mature XML applications to date.
In our first article, Mani Manickam explains how XML rises to meet the
challenge of heterogeneity amongst partner networks for syndicated
content. He details the rise of syndication in content exchange, not
just between media organizations, but between businesses in general, and
outlines the crucial criteria any commercial syndication system should
fulfil. Read more in "eSyndication: Heterogeneity Rules!".
XML standards have been under development for a long while in the news
industry. In fact, the standard for news markup, NITF, was originally
defined in SGML. In "XML in News Syndication"
I survey the various
established and emerging XML news standards, and fit together the jigsaw
of the XML-enabled future of news distribution.
Our final article in this special issue takes a different tack on
syndication. RSS, originally developed for the My.Netscape portal, has
become a very successful application of XML on web sites, and migrated
towards being used as a lightweight syndication format. Rael Dornfest,
implementor of O'Reilly's Meerkat RSS aggregation and search tool,
charts the history of the RSS format, and how it has created the
opportunity for new kinds of web applications. Read Rael's analysis
in RSS: Lightweight Web Syndication.