This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/ or send a letter to Creative Commons, 171 Second Street, Suite 300, San Francisco, California, 94105, USA. Oister is an XML schema meant to organize descriptive ordered lists, such as products, real estate listings, grocery lists, or anything else that can fit well in list form. Basically, an Oister file separates things on a list into "features." Each feature has a priority level and programs sorting the list should sort based on the priority level of features. Each feature can have numerous other elements that further describe the feature. importanceLvl is meant to prioritize features, so that applications can display the list of features accordingly. The importanceLvl must be declared in a feature's "priority" attribute and can be olne of six values, 'Ad', 'Highest', 'High', 'Normal', 'Low' or 'Lowest.' Advertisements can only have a priority level of "Ad." Applications should use a feature's priority level and not the timestamp when determining where to display a feature among a group of features. For example a feature with the priority level of Highest could be displayed at the top of a list of features, even if other features with lesser priority are newer. When multiple features have the same priority level, the timestamp may be used to place features in a particular order. This just defines the boolean type for use in other elements. This defines the versionNum type for use in elements that have a version number. This defines the pattern that is acceptable for an e-mail address. This is the root element of any Oister file, it is required for all Oister files and can only occur once in the file. It has the 'version' attribute, which is also required. This should be set to 1 if using the official schema. This is the first part of every Oister file. The brief element contains information about the site, such as the name and address as well as information about the creator(s), copyrights, licensing and much more. This element is required, it can only occur once. This is the name of the website or company utilizing the Oister file. It is required and can only occur once. This is the URL of the website that is utilizing the Oister file. This element can only occur once. This is designed for company slogans or phrases, such as "Make the World Yours." It is not required, but can not occur more than once. This is simply a parent element for information about the authors of the Oister document. This is the name of the author of the Oister file, not necessarily the author of the features contained within. It is not required and can occur any number of times in the case of multiple authors. This is the e-mail address of the author(s) of the Oister file. It is not required but can occur any number of times for multiple authors. This a URI of any sponsors that support the company that utilizes the Oister file. Since it is a URI (not necessarily just a URL), it can be anything that follows RFC 2396 (http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc2396.txt) or if using an IPv6 URI, RFC 2732 (http://www.w3.org/TR/xmlschema-2/#RFC2732). An HTTP URL, an FTP URL, or a mailto: link would all be appropriate, among other possibilities. It is not required and can occur any number of times. This is the date the Oister file was created. Dates should take the form YYYY-MM-DD. For example, 2010-08-19 represents August 19, 2010. createdate is not required but can't occur more than once. This is the date and time the Oister file should no longer be displayed or used. The format is YYYY-MM-DDTHH:MM:SSZ for UTC time or YYYY-MM-DDTHH:MM:SS-xx:00 for an offset to UTC time. For example, 2011-01-01T12:01:01Z would mean 12:01:01 p.m. on January 1, 2011 according to UTC time while 2011-01-01T12:01:01-05:00 would mean 12:01:01 p.m. January 1, 2011 Eastern Standard Time. It is not required but can not occur more than once. This is for any license(s) associated with the Oister file. It is not required but can occur no more than once. This is for any notes associated with the Oister file. It's designed to allow room for any ideas or messages the author(s) want to convey to anyone reading the file. It is not required and any number of note elements may occur. This is the element that contains the features, such as items on a grocery list, properties for sale in a real estate document, articles in an online newspaper or any number of other uses. This element is required and can only occur once. This is meant to contain up to 3 ads, each of which require a link and text. A URI to an image is optional. If an image URI is provided, the caption attribute should be used but is not strictly required. Each advertisement should have the 'Ad' priority level. The advertisement element is not required. This is arguably the most important element of an Oister file. Each feature can contain many other elements that describe an aspect of the feature. Each feature has two attributes, priority and hidepriority. The priority attribute describes the importance level of the feature, with one of five possible values: "Highest", "High", "Normal", "Low" or "Lowest." The hidepriority attribute is a boolean value. This attribute is not required, however, the default is false - which means priority level should be displayed. The feature element is not required and can occur any number of times. This is the title of the particular feature. This is required and can not occur more than once. This is used to associate up to three separate images for the feature. It contains two attributes: caption and imglink. The caption attribute value can be used as the img alt attribute value if transformed into HTML. The imglink attribute is the URI of the image. Images are optional. This is the main part of the feature. For example, say the feature is a particular post in a blog or an article in a magazine. This would be the text of the blog post or the text of the article. A description is required for each feature and can occur only once. This is for the contact information for the person or entity associated with the feature. Usually this would be the author of the particular feature, but it may be a separate person or company. For example, a real estate professional may have a listing in a feature in the real estate company's Oister file. The contact information might be the real estate professional or it might be the company or it might be another real estate professional. Contact is optional and can occur no more than once. This is a link to the feature itself, separate from the Oister file, if one exists. It is not required and can occur no more than once. This is an optional element that is used to enter key words or phrases about the feature. It can occur no more than once, but it can contain multiple words and/or phrases. This an optional element intended to contain a link to a way to associate comments with the feature, useful for blog posts. However, there is no real requirement as to how the comments element is utilized. It can occur no more than once. This element is optional. The media element is intended to associate a multimedia file with the feature. It has three required attributes, type, filelink, and filesize. Type is the MIME type, filelink is the URI that points to the file, and filesize is the size of the file in bytes. This is designed to contain a link to a map associated with the feature if desired. It is not required and can occur no more than once. This is the name of the author of the feature. It is optional and can occur no more than once. This is the e-mail address of the author of the feature. It is optional and can occur no more than once. This is for the names of any contributors to the feature. It is optional and can occur no more than once. This is for any copyright information associated with the feature, whether it be for any images or the description or anything else in the feature. It is optional and can occur no more than once. This is for any documentation to go with the feature that may not necessarily fit anywhere else. For example, instructions on how to find out more infromation about something referenced in the feature could go here. It is optional and can occur no more than once. This is a standard guid element used for identifying the feature. It has no standard format so as to allow people or companies writing Oister files to use any identification structure. It is optional and can occur no more than once. This is the datetime that the feature was created. The format should be YYYY-MM-DDTHH:MM:SST, where the second T is the timezone represented with a number from -14:00 to +14:00. It is an optional element and can occur no more than once. The showuntil element is meant to be used as a datetime the application should use to stop showing the associated feature. The format should be YYYY-MM-DDTHH:MM:SST, where T is the timezone represented with a number from -14:00 to +14:00. It is an optional element and can occur no more than once.