RSS 0.94

[Julian Bond <julian_bond@voidstar.com>]

I find it extraordinarily sad that the RSS 0.94 development effort is 
happening across multiple weblogs and multiple comment threads and not 
here. So having got that off my chest, here's my two pennyworth.

I'd like to see:-

- The 0.94 spec re-written in the style of the early RFCs, like rfc822 
for instance. These are models of clear, concise, accurate text that 
would be worth emulating.

- A deliberate effort to remove all ambiguity. There are a number of 
places in the proposed spec where language is used that is very open to 
interpretation. For instance, my favourite; "<link> is the URL of the 
story." in the <item> description.

- Notes on elements that are deprecated even though they are left in for 
compatibility.

- A more complete sample and sample snippets that illustrate the use of 
every element.

- Some commentary on common usage.

- The removal of the restriction on using link types other than http and 
ftp. In particular, I can't see any good reason for banning https and I 
can think of (fairly bizarre!) applications where news and mailto would 
be handy.

- A <category> tag on channel that is similar to <item><category>

- A DTD and a set of recommendations of how to reference the DTD that 
can handle foreign character sets without breaking validating parsers.

- A note deprecating the use of entity-encoded html in any element 
except <item><description>

And finally, and somewhat contentiously,

- The removal of the copyright notice. I cannot think of any good reason 
for a corporate copyright disclaimer on a standards specification.

--
Julian Bond Email&MSM: julian.bond@voidstar.com
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