xsl-list
[Top] [All Lists]

RE: rss, in all its guises

2003-07-21 01:22:31

 They make it effectively impossible to handle RSS with XML 
tools. For these reasons, I used RSS as an example of not to design 
an XML application in Effective XML.

+1 to that !

RSS supposedly gained adoption, because there were some cool tools for it, 
there was nothing else better, other people were using it ( who had some useful 
content ) and it 'appeared' to be in xml; so it was a perfect match with 
respect to syndicating content. 

Personally, I find it very odd that people herald any particular format as 
useful, with respect to a vocabulary in xml; if it doesnt fit, one is a 
transform away to something better.....so the idea that the 'format' of RSS is 
powerful and useful was and always will be a matter of taste for me. 

On the other hand, the insanity of not conforming to underlying xml standard 
means that RSS is just one of those 'almost' technologies, that seemed to be 
the right way....but in the end compromised itself; and now it just looks like 
an embarressing mistake. No doubt, embarressing mistakes like RSS get used 
every day all the time in our industry, so arguing the case against RSS is a 
bit moot, it is a successful technology; but for all its simplicity its typical 
usage imposes a  barrier to integrating it for no reason.

+1 to DavidP comment that v2.0 does little in the way of explicitly defining 
constraints on the data model; though it does explicitly state that it must 
conform to the xml 1.0 ( http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-xml )....now waiting around 
to see if it happens in the wild is another thing.

RSS should be held up of what happens when we lower our standards with respect 
to allowing anything less then well formed, valide xml. 

just my 2p, jim fuller


 XSL-List info and archive:  http://www.mulberrytech.com/xsl/xsl-list



<Prev in Thread] Current Thread [Next in Thread>