Archive of UserLand's first discussion group, started October 5, 1998.

Re: What to do about RSS

Author:Ken MacLeod
Posted:9/4/2000; 9:12:29 AM
Topic:scriptingNews outline for 9/2/2000
Msg #:20793 (In response to 20758)
Prev/Next:20792 / 20794

The concern I have with the latest round of RSS proposals is that it moves RSS away from something that can be parsed with an extremely simple (read, not a full-blown XML) parser to a format that requires a complete, validating parser with support for DTDs and namespaces.

The RDF+NS RSS 1.0 does not require a complete, validating parser with support for DTDs, any more than RSS 0.91 did.

Dave summarized his pov as to why some people perceive XML namespaces as being difficult:

The problem with namespaces at a user or HTML-coder level is that it scatters the docs for a format across a variety of sites, an unknown number, with varying quality, and doesn't do anything to avoid semantic collisions and creates an infinite number of sub-formats, which might be satisfying to someone who has devoted their whole existence to appreciating the intricacies, but makes it very complicated to someone who doesn't understand what Dublin Core is, or other strange concepts.

This is true in some cases, but it is definitely something that has to be addressed on a case-by-case basis. As far as the RDF+NS version of RSS, this is not correct.

There is a single site to go to for mainstream modules (it is open for all to contribute, like Perl's CPAN or TeX's CTAN), the quality of the majority of the modules will be as good as the best participant can make them (because all are open to editing by the best editor to agree to the task), and the group is cooperating very well in managing semantic collision.

It should be noted that RSS 0.91 already suffers from worse problems than the RDF+NS version RSS 1.0 is maligned as to having to suffer from by using namespaces. There are already variants of RSS 0.91, the docs are either unavailable or spread across many sites, of the docs that are available they are of varying quality, and semantic and name collision is rampant.

There are responses to this message:

This page was archived on 6/13/2001; 4:56:30 PM.

© Copyright 1998-2001 UserLand Software, Inc.