Re: [syndication] Re: Thoughts, questions, and issues.

[Eric Bohlman <ebohlman@netcom.com>]

On Wed, 16 Aug 2000, Mark Alexander wrote:

> Having looked at both versions of RSS, I am confused. We are losing the hierarchy of data elements within the RSS structure and instead creating this Hierarchy with the <inchannel> tag. To me the Hierarchy is one of the strengths of XML and flattening out this Hierarchy becomes very problematic if the if the Hierarchy is more than 1 level deep.

That bugged me too.  You shouldn't have to explicitly code simple
parent-child relationships, any more than you should have to supply
explicit counts for the number of items.  Aside from being unaesthetic,
it's error-prone.  One of XML's biggest strengths is that it can easily
model containment relationships.  <inchannel> looks like an explicit key
you'd use if you were trying to model the data with an RDBMS.

If the objective is to allow items to belong to multiple channels, there
are IMHO better ways of doing it (like using an <itemref> element or the
like; take a look at how aliases are handled in XBEL for an example).