[Playlist] xspf pagination

[Alf Eaton]

Chris Anderson wrote:
> On 9/1/07, Ivo Emanuel Gonçalves <justivo at gmail.com> wrote:
>> On 9/1/07, Chris Anderson <jchris at mfdz.com> wrote:
>>> I'm thinking that perhaps using the link attribute,
>>> with rel="next" would be the best way to do it within the spec.
>> That makes no sense, in my opinion.  It looks like a hack to go around
>> a certain program, and thus it is a bad idea.
> 
> The real world situation that suggests this is Grabb.it's search
> service, which returns the top twenty matches, and currently has no
> facility for requesting additional matches (other than refining search
> terms).
> 
> My options in this case seem to be:
> 
> (1 - the bad one) just have the Grabb.it client software know how to
> paginate through result sets, instead of following uris to get them.

Using OpenSearch would seem to make sense here, adding the OpenSearch 
response fields to an XSPF playlist in the same way as they're added to 
Atom/RSS/HTML search results (ie use XSPF as an OpenSearch response format).

> (2 - better) follow a uri in the xspf document to get the next page of
> results. the rel="next" method is valid XSPF and falls inline with the
> best practices in other documents and feed types that Lucas pointed
> out.

If one of the items in a playlist is a playlist, I think I'd expect a 
client to work through that nested playlist recursively, so you wouldn't 
need the special case of 'rel="next"'.

> I was hoping that some other XSPF client programmers might see the
> utility of being able to link between playlists in a reliable way.
> This is a small step in the direction of creating an ecosystem of
> playlists.
> 
> A large step would be offering an OPML listing of a set of playlists.
> I'm happy to see some movement in this direction by sites like
> StreamRipper. Hopefully we'll see more of it, but I'm afraid the
> Myspace-flash-embed crowd might be not see the incentive. Walled
> gardens vs ecosystems, I suppose...

Couldn't you just make an XSPF playlist of playlists?

alf.