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

[Eric Bohlman <ebohlman@netcom.com>]

On 23 Aug 2000, Ken MacLeod wrote:

> "Paulo Gaspar" <Paulo.Gaspar@krankikom.de> writes:
> 
> > Thinks like namespaces still can cause headaches to many people
> 
> Why? is it the concept or a lack of support in the tools available to
> those people?

It appears to be the latter.  Apparently some people are reading RSS
without using an XML parser because there isn't one available for their
platform, and using either namespaces or attributes greatly complicates
their work.  However, if we're going to accommodate such people, we'd have
to impose quite a few lexical restrictions on the XML used in RSS, because
hack-parsing code is unlikely to accommodate anything other than
ISO8859-1, unlikely to be able to expand numeric character references, let
alone defined entities, likely to be sensitive to the placement of
newlines, etc.  So the issue may in fact be a red herring.