Re: [RSS-DEV] Re: [syndication] Re: Thoughts, questions, and issues.

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

On Mon, 21 Aug 2000, Seth Russell wrote:

> Ian Graham (in another group) wrote:
> 
> > In this respect,
> > I've argued (in vain) that what one should do is create a
> > _syndication_
> > language that models the essential issues of syndication, and that
> > then
> > lets you embed any type of data (using namespaces, for example)
> > inside
> > this syndication framework.
> 
> Well shucks that's what i wanted too.  
> Why not just have a content tag?
> 
> <item>
>    ...whatever...
>    <content  xmlns:XXX="http://MYWHATEVER#> 
>    ..... any XML markup content whatsoever ....
>    </content>
> </item>
> 
> And the RSS 1.0 spec would not care in the slightest 
> what was inside the content tag.

As I said in my response on [syndication]

  Well, that's fine, but entirely avoids the question:  what generic,
  minimal set of information is desired in a data syndication message,
  independent of the data being syndicated?  

To extend this:  syndication is more than RSS, and involves issues that
this list (nor the syndication list) has not talked about or worked
through.  As a result, the syndication list is happily defining a
specification without any clear understanding of what problem it is
supposed to solve.

{things are different over here in RSS-DEV -- which seems simply
 to be trying to migrate RSS to something that makes RSS more 
 extensible/portable using RDF and namespaces, without breaking
 compatibility with RSS 0.9x. My feeling is that this backward
 compatiblity  is not worth the effort -- far better to rethink
 the problem and get it right, and then deal with old RSS stuff
 as a special (legacy) case.  But that's just One Persons Opinion
 (OPO). }
 
IMHO, the syndication list should stop worring about RDF / namespaces/
whatever, and start thinking about what syndication information needs to
be in the message that gets sent.

Once we understand that, then we can worry about the best syntax for
expressing it.

Ian