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

[Ken MacLeod <ken@bitsko.slc.ut.us>]

Eric Bohlman <ebohlman@netcom.com> writes:

> 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.

I agree.  With the variety of XML tools involved in processing RSS, if
someone's not using a real XML parser they're bound to get bit in a
big way sooner or later.  Specifically because none of the RSS specs
have ever constrained the XML used.

  -- Ken