Hina-Di

Hina-Di was a syndication format; one of the Japanese equivalents of RSS. You can browse a local copy of its documentation site.

Version 2.2

Revision 0.5

• Published on 2000-09-23
• Original on the Wayback Machine
• Local copy
• English translation

Revision 0.6

• Published on 2000-09-24
• Original on the Wayback Machine
• Local copy
• English translation

Includes small fixes on the BNF grammar, and two new statements:

• Metadata propagation is explicitly forbidden if the Authorized or Authorized-url fields are not specified.
• Propagation of the Method field should be done using the process defined in the Method section, but the Method section remains “TBD”, so there is no actual process.

Revision 0.7

• Published on 2000-09-24
• Original on the Wayback Machine
• Local copy
• English translation

Adds the HINA-Version entity block field, recommends making the URL the first field of an entity block, and adds text encoding considerations.

Revision 0.8

• Published on 2000-09-30
• Original on the Wayback Machine
• Local copy
• English translation

Includes some BNF fixes and more explicit phrasing, as well as some breaking changes:

• The URL field becomes the Virtual field when it is the only field of an entity block; the URL then points to a file that holds the entity block, not to the document itself. This is similar in concept to rdf:resource.
• The Author-Name field is now case-sensitive.

Revision 0.9

• Published on 2000-10-05
• Original on the Wayback Machine
• Local copy
• English translation

The Virtual name now is truly called Virtual, and not URL, which reduces the confusion. Note that the original version had a type in its BNF grammar, causing the field to actually be named Virutal.

Revision 0.10

• Published on 2001-02-22
• Original on the Wayback Machine
• Local copy
• English translation

BNF grammar fixes again, as well as some breaking changes and a new feature for images:

• Dates are now required to use 4-digit years via RFC 1123, instead of the two digits permitted by RFC 2616.
• The Image-Width and Image-Height fields add more optional metadata for entity blocks describing images.
• Fields are now required to be unique per block; a block with duplicate fields must be ignored.

Revision 0.11

• Published on 2001-05-09
• Original on the Wayback Machine
• Local copy
• English translation

HINA 2.2 is retrograded to 2.2 beta.

Revision 0.12

• Published on 2001-11-07
• Original on the Wayback Machine
• Local copy
• English translation

Another BNF grammar fix; this also defines the use of the URL as a unique identifier for entity blocks, and explicitly encourages using experimental fields over undefined fields for data that might not be directly obtained from the document’s metadata.

Revision 0.13

• Published on 2002-07-19
• Original on the Wayback Machine
• Local copy
• English translation

The specification has been converted from a text file to a webpage, and some BNF grammars have been made more explicit. An appendix was added, which gives some additional information on the origins of Hina-Di.

Field names are no longer case-sensitive, and field values are explicitly made case-insensitive by default.

Known implementations

• Asahina-Antenna, the project for which Hina-Di was created, obviously implements Hina-Di.
• RSS Panel X is a Greasemonkey script that supports, among other formats, Hina-Di.
• Kazehakase was a GTK+ web browser that used WebKit and Gecko and had support for RSS, LIRS and Hina-Di.