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

[Ian Graham <ian.graham@utoronto.ca>]

On Wed, 16 Aug 2000, Eric Bohlman wrote:

> 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.
>

Yes -- this is one of the points I've been trying to make, albeit
badly. The RSS (or syndication) markup _structure_ should
straightforwardly represnt the main concepts and components of
syndicated data, without needing RDF's more complex semantics. 
RDF can then be used to augment this basic language.

Ian