Re: [syndication] DTD's are back.

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

Dan, thanks for working with Netscape to get these files restored.

And, there was a surprise here.

http://my.netscape.com/publish/formats/rss-spec-0.91.html

Read the Notes section [1] at the head of the document. This is, I believe,
the first time I have seen this document.

This clears up once and for all what RSS 0.91 is about. Now maybe we can
move past the endless debating. Netscape's view in 1999 and UserLand's were
totally aligned. The lineage is also documented, and the role that Netscape
played in adapting the elements from our format. Your spec says "We're
trying to move towards a more standard format, and to this end we have
included several tags from the popular <scriptingNews> format."

In other words, we brought something to the table, a popular format, and we
joined two formats into a single format. Yup, that's the way I remember it.
Nice.

Dave

[1] Files must be 100% valid XML. We're trying to move towards a more
standard format, and to this end we have included several tags from the
popular <scriptingNews> format. We have also ensured that this version is
100% valid XML. We did this by requiring that a DOCTYPE tag be included, and
validating each RSS document against that DTD. This means that it is not
enough for an RSS document to be "well-formed". It must also be "valid" with
respect to its DTD.
No mixed content tags. We are specifically not including any tags that
contain mixed content in RSS 0.91. This means that each tag either contains
sub-tags only, or text only, not a combination. This is both because we want
to keep the format simple, and because our current validation system is not
able to handle this type of tag. We also are not allowing any HTML markup
beyond the commonly used entities such as &quot; A full list of these are
defined in the RSS 0.91 DTD.

New tags for syndication community. Our validator will now allow several new
tags through the system, though most of them will not actually be used by
Netcenter. However, these may work when syndicating content to other sites.
These tags are noted explicitly in the spec as "ignored."

RDF references removed. RSS was originally conceived as a metadata format
providing a summary of a website. Two things have become clear: the first is
that providers want more of a syndication format than a metadata format. The
structure of an RDF file is very precise and must conform to the RDF data
model in order to be valid. This is not easily human-understandable and can
make it difficult to create useful RDF files. The second is that few tools
are available for RDF generation, validation and processing. For these
reasons, we have decided to go with a standard XML approach.