Re: Thoughts, questions, and issues.

[malexander@acm.org]

--- In syndication@egroups.com, Aaron Swartz <aswartz@s...> wrote:
> Mark Alexander <malexander@a...> 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.
> 
> We're not losing it -- just trying to maintain backwards-
> compatibility with RSS 0.9.

RSS 1.0 has lost it. Plain and simple.  The new tag allows the spec
to kind of almost have it for a single level of depth.  But the
idea of specific link tags to define a level of hierarchy will
simply fail when the data has multiple levels of Hierarchy.
The data I am looking at has about 8 levels of Hierarchy.
It can easily be encoded in RSS 0.91,  but will fail completely
with RSS 1.0.

If this tag structure is required to support RDF, then maybe the
RDF support should be re-considered.  I dont have any issues with
the use of Namespaces.  Namespaces are an ugly way to define a set
of specific tags, but quite honestly I cannot think of a way to
do a similar feature that would be any less ugly.  I therefore feel
that the uglyness is a necessary evil.

Mark