Information Exchange

Exchanging information between a blog system and a consumer of this information can be an issue, if no standards are followed.

The need to query a consumer's supported formats can be circumvented by sending all possible information the blog system **can** generate to it, in some format the consumer can parse, ignoring all information it doesn't understand.

I think the best method to tackle this is to POST all information to the consumer, in some standard XML format, using namespaces, where every namespace got a URI which is bound to some version of the specification it represents.

Take an average RDF (eg FOAF) file, where FOAF, DC, GEO data and more are combined. If the parser uses all namespaces, great, if not, you can use a subset of the provided information without any problems.