Subject: Atom Export

From: Alastair Rankine <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 27 Sep 2006 21:21:07 +1000

Hello Atom folks,

Here is a proposal for an Atom-derived format for exporting of content.

The problem I'm trying to solve is that of migration from one  
authoring system (eg blogging engine) to another. Atom is highly  
suited to this task.

The full problem statement, and the reasons for basing the solution  
on Atom, are all described in the proposal published here:

http://girtby.net/offerings/atomexport

There is no implementation yet.

I look forward to your comments on this document.

---

From: Bill de hOra <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 27 Sep 2006 21:20:20 +0100

Alastair Rankine wrote:
> The problem I'm trying to solve is that of migration from one authoring 
> system (eg blogging engine) to another. Atom is highly suited to this task.
> 
> The full problem statement, and the reasons for basing the solution on 
> Atom, are all described in the proposal published here:
> 

Very quickly (I'm overloaded atm) - this is excellent.

I've been looking at using Atom Entries for roundtripping/backup and 
interchange, especially in CMSes, for some time. The ultimate dump 
format in terms of expressiveness is RDF/XML, but it can be complicated. 
Atom offers a lot of value with comparative simplicity largely because 
atom:id can survive across systems*, but also because the flat format of 
entries maps well onto relational data (it's particularly good for 
dumping metadata). One hard problem is in usefully storing and indexing 
received foreign markup.

cheers
Bill

* that said, for "consumer" data, the APP leans towards, or least 
allows, rewriting of atom:ids due to trust issues.

---

From: James M Snell <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 27 Sep 2006 13:38:43 -0700

I haven't done much deep thinking about this proposal yet, but the one
thing that concerns me are the non-atom resources that go along with the
entries.  When I export from a blog, I want to be able to export
everything in a single operation.  I've been stewing lately over the
possibility of doing something similar to this but wrapping the atom
documents and associated resources into a zip.  A single master atom
feed would provide an index of the archive, with individual entries
either contained in that index feed or as separate entry documents
(modeled loosely after the distinction app makes between the collection
feed and individual editable entries.

- James