Re: [syndication] Re: RSS 0.92 Spec

["Dave Winer" <dave@userland.com>]

Mike thanks for the thoughtful message.

So much to say about it..

In some kind of ideal world every weblog item would contain a title, a link
and a description, but you rarely see that, because HTML is the dominant
format and it allows every word to be a link, and this is something most
weblog authors take advantage of.

So what to do?

My first attempt to deal with this, in an imperfect way, was in
<scriptingNews> format in late 1997 and still in use today. Here's an
example of my own weblog as viewed through this format:

http://scriptingnews.userland.com/xml/scriptingNews2.xml

This approach is imperfect, because it sometimes matches the wrong text with
the link when it's put back together on the aggregator. But you do get the
text separated from the links, but what do you gain from that? Hard to tell.
A simple parser on the aggregator side could do the same thing with the
source text.

RSS 0.90 and 0.91 happened to quickly to even begin to address this concern
and weblogs were still pretty new then.

A turning point for me was a brief email exchange a few months back with
Evan Williams, the developer of the popular "Blogger" weblogging tool. Since
his tool is news-item-oriented, and not free-form (as my company's Manila
tool is) I thought RSS would be a perfect fit. He said it wasn't, he didn't
say why, but my mind snapped right into this conundrum. I think he's on this
list, so maybe he'll comment.

Dave







----- Original Message -----
From: "Mike Krus" <mwkrus@yahoo.com>
To: <syndication@yahoogroups.com>
Sent: Saturday, February 10, 2001 10:57 PM
Subject: [syndication] Re: RSS 0.92 Spec


> --- In syndication@y..., "Dave Winer" <dave@u...> wrote:
> > Dear Syndicators,
> >
> > I'm just about wrapping up my work with the RSS 0.92 specification.
> >
> > http://backend.userland.com/rss092
> one thing I don't like about that, well actually it's not about
> the specs it's about the sample files you show: they don't contain
> a link tag for the items but rather encode HTML <A> tags in the
> item title. To me, this means that you are not separating content
> (item, link and link text) from presentation (HTML formatting).
> IMHO, this not in the spirit of XML.
>
> It's simple and all, but make's it harder to transform that
> content to do other things than simple webloging...
>
>
> Mike Krus
> http://www.newsisfree.com/
>
>
>
>