Really Simple Discovery

Really Simple Discovery (RSD) is an XML format and a publishing convention for making services exposed by blog, or other web software, discoverable by client software.

It is a way to reduce the information required to set up editing/blogging software to three well known elements:

Any other critical settings should either be defined in the RSD file related to the blog, or discoverable using the information provided.

1 History
2 Format
3 Contents
4 Usage of RSD
5 References
6 See also
7 External links

History

RSD was authored by Daniel Berlinger in the Really Simple Discoverability 1.0 specification.

Format

To make use of RSD, the owner of a site places a link tag in the head section of the homepage which indicates the location of the RSD file. An example of what MediaWiki uses is:

<link rel="EditURI" type="application/rsd+xml" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/w/api.php?action=rsd" />

If this tag is missing or the file is not found, clients should look in the default location which is a file named rsd.xml in the webroot.^[1] For example:

http://example.com/rsd.xml

Here is a sample RSD file, from "Really Simple Discoverability 1.0":

 <?xml version="1.0" ?> 
 <rsd version="1.0" xmlns="http://archipelago.phrasewise.com/rsd" >
    <service>
        <engineName>Blog Munging CMS</engineName> 
        <engineLink>http://www.blogmunging.com/</engineLink>
        <homePageLink>http://www.userdomain.com/</homePageLink>
        <apis>
                <api name="MetaWeblog" preferred="true" apiLink="http://example.com/xml/rpc/url" blogID="123abc" />
                <api name="Blogger" preferred="false" apiLink="http://example.com/xml/rpc/url" blogID="123abc" />
                <api name="MetaWiki" preferred="false" apiLink="http://example.com/some/other/url" blogID="123abc" />
                <api name="Antville" preferred="false" apiLink="http://example.com/yet/another/url" blogID="123abc" />
                <api name="Conversant" preferred="false" apiLink="http://example.com/xml/rpc/url" blogID="">
                    <settings>
                        <docs>http://www.conversant.com/docs/api/ </docs> 
                        <notes>Additional explanation here.</notes>
                        <setting name="service-specific-setting">a value</setting> 
                        <setting name="another-setting">another value</setting> 
                         ... 
                    </settings>
                 </api>
        </apis>
    </service>
 </rsd>

MediaWiki example^[2]:

<?xml version="1.0"?>
<rsd version="1.0" xmlns="http://archipelago.phrasewise.com/rsd">
	<service>
		<apis>
			<api name="MediaWiki" preferred="true" apiLink="http://en.wikipedia.org/w/api.php" blogID="">
				<settings>
					<docs xml:space="preserve">http://mediawiki.org/wiki/API</docs>
					<setting name="OAuth" xml:space="preserve">false</setting>
				</settings>
			</api>
		</apis>
		<engineName xml:space="preserve">MediaWiki</engineName>
		<engineLink xml:space="preserve">http://www.mediawiki.org/</engineLink>
	</service>
</rsd>

Really Simple Discovery

Contents

History

Format

Contents

Usage of RSD

References

See also

External links