Re: [syndication] Time for XHTML-RSS?

[Tristan Louis <tristan@tnl.net>]

Quoting Doug Ransom <doug.ransom@alumni.uvic.ca>:

<SNIP>

> 2.  My goal is to drasticallly reduce the barrier to syndication. Its
> easy to add a couple of tags into an HTML document.  It much harder to
> get programming resources to create RSS for an HTML developer,and to
> manage two different files.
>
That was the original attempt that I had when I first came up with a way to 
markup XHTML and RSS in the same document. After all, if you think about 
it, once you have defined a channel, an RSS item is nothing more than a 
link, a title and a description. If we could find a way to embed those into 
an XHTML document (and embed the channel header in the head of an XHTML 
document), we could then have a file that works on both browsers and 
aggregators.
 
> Browsers would NOT generally interpret RSS tags and mark them up UNLESS
> the page author wanted them too by applying a CSS class to them.
> Markup for web browsers is HTML, and markup for aggregators is in RSS 2
> (I don't think RSS 1 can work in this manner).  The author still
> controls what content is syndicated, as conttent not within RSS item
> tags will not be interpreted by RSS user agents like Radio etc.
> 
My initial thought was that RSS 1 might be better suited for this as it 
already does support named spaces. However, what you will find is that 
XHTML modularization can't happen in a world where the XHTML spec is 
inappropriate for modularization (for my longer rant on this, see 
http://www.tnl.net/blog/2003/4/25#ModuleMadnessandSemanticStupidity )

> This is in the spirit of the W3 recommendations for XHTML and
> modularization.  The most well known example is RDDL http://rddl.org/.
> Mark up for browsers and other user agents for humans is in HTML.
> Markup for programs which do something other than present the
> information to the user (in this case, pointing to resources associated
> with a namespace, like XML schemas, sample instance documents, etc)
> 
Yet, any example of "proper" XHTML modularization seems to fail the litmus 
test of validating as XHTML in the W3C validator.

> Browsers would not be responsible for checking such pages for updates --
> they just treat them as HTML pages.  But the same URI can be copied into
> an aggregator, and the same document interpreted by an aggregator.
> 
On the other hand, NG browser could check for freshness (as subscribed 
pages can be checked on Mozilla and IE) and we could eventually see a meger 
of browsers and aggregators down the line (think of what newsmonster 
already demonstrated)

> This is a totally different approach than marking up an RSS document
> with CSS in an aggregator.  And it would be very easy to update
> aggregators to do this -- they just ignore some content.
> 
Good point.

<SNIP>

TNL
-- 

Tristan Louis
http://www.tnl.net