[CAP] cap implementations

[Art Botterell]

On Oct 4, 2005, at 10/4/05 5:17 AM, Mick Jagger wrote:
> Atom vs RSS, now there's a touchy subject.

Right, although mostly for personal/religious reasons, IMHO.  After  
looking at both formats we went with Atom mainly because it used the  
XML dateTime-style times instead of the RFC 811 format.  We had to  
make a choice somehow, and that was actually the strongest criterion  
we found.

> My preference would be to provide the minimum amount of data in the  
> "index feed" if that what its called.

Makes sense.  This format actually started as an index for automated  
clients that were, among other things, location-aware... so we wanted  
to provide enough information for them to select out items not in  
their area of interest or that didn't meet other basic filter  
criteria.  (See <http://www.edis.ca.gov/cap/index.xml> for the  
earlier version.)

Making it RSS-compatible for human readers was, actually, a bit of an  
afterthought.  And California OES has a long-standing policy against  
making editorial changes in messages that come from other agencies,  
so summarizing the content wasn't really on the agenda... although  
adding the appropriate summary field certainly wouldn't break the  
implementation.

- Art