RSS to DBH?

So, I’m sitting here at the KanREN Annual Reps’ Conference thinking about all the new content that is being tagged in RSS, Atom, etc…

So, the web is really becoming a gigantic, poorly cataloged resouce. While some efforts have been made to index the web, and Web 2.0 mashups are all the rage, is anyone treating the web (or a portion of which) as a filehandle or database handle?

Seems like an API for treating this information as such would be valuable. Perhaps a WEBHANDLE should be developed to provide a programming language feature to iterate over a site’s RSS feeds, and any other marked-up data?

Maybe it should work like this:

url_array = [ http://url1/bogus, http://url2/bogus ]

WEBHANDLE = webhandle_open(url_array)

while WEBHANDLE

# could you cast as rss entry object?

rss_entry = (rss) WEBHANDLE.next()

# could you cast as atom entry?
atom_entry = (atom) WEBHANDLE.next()

# should it use the object-oriented style?

entry = WEBHANDLE.next()

switch (entry.type())

case 'rss':

# Do rss operations
break

end