[georss] Styling GeoRss points

[Ron Lake]

HI,

Charlie:

I suggest that you use OGC terminology here which is also aligned with
general web terminology.

Styling:  The process of interpreting geographic or other content for
presentation - graphically or otherwise.  Content then is concerned with
modeling something - representing properties of the item of interest.  

Styling is usually specified by rules that express how to interpret the
content for presentation whether this is graphical (e.g. SVG, KML) or
textual (e.g. XHTML) or audible (e.g. VoiceXML) etc.

While I can't say I understand the real scope of GeoRSS - I think that
styling rule mechanisms already exist in OGC (SLD - Symbology Encoding)
and I would think that would be a starting point.  You can then target
various presentation languages (SVG, KML VoiceXML) from there.

Ron Lake
CEO and Chairman
Galdos Systems Inc
+1-604-484-2751
Be there when GIS and the Web unite! Register now for GeoWeb 2007 at
www.geoweb.org


-----Original Message-----
From: georss-bounces at lists.eogeo.org
[mailto:georss-bounces at lists.eogeo.org] On Behalf Of Charlie Savage
Sent: June 5, 2007 8:38 PM
To: georss at lists.eogeo.org
Subject: Re: [georss] Styling GeoRss points

Thanks everyone for the various suggestions.  Sounds like there really 
isn't any consensus on the best way to proceed.  There does seem to be 
some common threads though:
* Styling should not be part of GeoRSS
* But are icons markup or style (css and kml differ)?
* No matter what, best to reuse some standard - KML, SLD, SVG and XHTML 
were mentioned.

Here is another idea, based on a post to the atom newsgroup two years 
ago (see
http://www.mail-archive.com/atom-syntax@mail.imc.org/msg05777.html)

<feed>
   <entry>
     <georss:point>...</georss:point>
     <link rel="symbol"
           href="http://www.mapbuzz.com/images/marker.png"/>
     <link rel="symbol_hover"
           href="http://www.mapbuzz.com/images/marker.png"/>
   </entry>
</feed>

So reuse link but add two new choices to rel - "symbol" and 
"symbol_hover" (I didn't use icon to avoid confusion with the atom:icon 
element).

Seems nice and simple, and a reasonable use of the link element.  You 
lose the ability to specify width/height though (implied in png, not so 
much in svg).

If that is a deal breaker, then either you'd have to add attributes to 
link or go back to something like <svg:image> and add a "rel" attribute 
to that (can't win either way!).

I lean against the embedded KML solution, because KML considers icons to

be styling information.  Which then would lead to the question of why 
wouldn't you also add KML to an atom entry to describe how to render 
lines/polygons/etc.

At that point, if you wanted to use KML to describe how to style 
geometries, I'd say that's a totally separate file like a stylesheet. 
But once you went that far, why bother with GeoRSS at all since you 
could put everything in KML?

So it seems to me there are two levels here - the simpler GeoRSS 
solution and the more complex, but much more feature rich KML solution, 
and I probably wouldn't mix the two.

Charlie


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