Re: [syndication] Re: Ads in RSS

[Jim Winstead <jimw-yahoo@trainedmonkey.com>]

On Thu, Mar 15, 2001 at 01:31:32PM -0800, Dan Lyke wrote:
> Ow. Okay, I retract any nice thing I may have said about the designers
> of RSS .92.

well, dave is a practical guy. he proposes a solution that
works and is easy to understand. pretty inelegant, i would
agree, but it gets the job done.

> > title and link aren't even required in 0.92, which makes it a
> > reasonable format for syndicating diary-style-weblog content.
> 
> I can actually think of a whole lot of reasons to avoid title and link
> in an entry, that makes perfect sense to me.

right. shame that the rss 1.0 designers didn't see the wisdom.

> >   http://doc.weblogs.com/xml/rss.xml
> 
> Eeewww. Eeewww. Get it off me! Get it off!
> 
> (Interestingly, that file's header identifies it as .91...)

right. i think the only thing generating rss 0.92 (beyond some
various homebrew stuff) is radio. an example:

http://www.ourfavoritesongs.com/users/dave@userland.com/rss/gratefulDead.xml

the thing is, anyone using manila do maintain a weblog gets
this rss-ization for free.

> > heck, there's even sites that don't encode the html:
> >   http://www.theregister.co.uk/tonys/slashdot.rdf
> 
> Okay, that's just so far over the top it's not even worth considering,
> 'cause it sure ain't XML.

right. i just brought them up as an example of someone who had
content that didn't fit the neat little box that rss tried to
put them in, and made do.

and it is perfectly valid xml. the various html tags they use were
all balanced. (they've since fallen out of the feed, but the register
frequently has html within their <title> elements.)

> I stand corrected. I'll be leaving now to take a shower to wash away
> the ickyness. I mean, why even bother with XML if you're going to do
> stuff like that? We'd be far better off with "<div>" blocks in the
> HTML.

why bother with xml if you can't do the things you want with it?

because rss is so easy (like html), people will do what they need
when they have data that doesn't quite fit. see the moreover rss
feeds, for example -- they stuff the source and date/time into the
description field last time i looked. they also offer a more rich
xml format that lets them seperate those fields out. the 'abused rss'
plays nicely with tools that handle rss, the richer xml format lets
people who want to take advantage of the extra data do so easily.

(rss 1.0's modularity addresses this, i guess. i haven't seen an
example of anyone putting xhtml into the description fields, for
example, or a tool that would handle that.)

jim