Screaming Penguin

So I have been spending some serious time lately working out the design for a Java TOTSP codebase. (FWIW, I now have almost all of the basic persistence layer, the skin system and skeletons in good order.) However, in my foray into the world of modern blogging, I have to say, there is a lot of crazy stuff. First, as many people are aware, there are the various iterations of RSS/RDF. The basic Netscape RSS has been supplanted by RDF with RSS extension from a variety of sources. PURL.org namespace extentions are everywhere to plug holes in content type and encoding in the RSS spec. However, there is still a mishmosh of RSS 0.91 through RSS 2.0, that is a full RDF compliant spec. Add to that the symantic web intiative with OWL on RDF and there is a whole furball of specs there. The rising star is, of course, the ATOM specification which has been adopted by Google/Blogger and is now being considered for W3C certification status. This is a pretty full-featured beast based on SOAP and WSSE that includes the feature set of RSS-style syndicatation as well as a publishing and access service layer akin to the BloggerAPI and its ilk. Of course, speaking of that... BloggerAPI, along with MetaWeblog API and a couple of others are XML-RPC implementations of publishing services that, presumably, will be superceded by ATOM, but are still supported everywhere. Then, of course, there is OPML, yet another syndication service slash content management API that seems to be pretty much a Manilla only thing. At any rate, ATOM seems to be the heir-appearant to this mess, but implementations of it are kind of sketchy right now. ATOM is a completely community driven system and has gone through several MASSIVE iterations -- mostly people seem to be implementing 0.94, though 1.0 was the first version to actually include the WSSE security system, and even that went through 2 different version. I have to admit, picking which of these to implement is more daunting a task than ACTUALLY implementing any of them. For the time being, though, I expect to support the RDF/RSS 1.0 system the penguin has always provided for newsreaders. In addition, I definitely want to support the BloggerAPI, since that is what is supported by Mozblog publisher for Mozilla. And Atom4J has the 0.9 ATOM spec, and adding WSSE security to it so it can approach 1.0 shouldn't be to big of a task. As to all the rest if it, WOW. Thats a lot of shit. I would really like to get an RDF/OWL system up that is up with Tim Berners-Lee's big metaweb puch, but it really opens up a lot to sift through. I can't believe all these blogging people have been dealing with this crap for so long. I really have set a goal, however, to start pushing the jTOTSP system into the top class of blog software with MovableType and WordPress. Honestly, I really don't see much of a challenge there.