RE: [RSS-DEV] Re: [syndication] Time for XHTML-RSS?

["Danny Ayers" <danny666@virgilio.it>]

> 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.

A worthy goal, and I see how people that turn out pages in e.g. Dreamweaver
would be helped. But what proportion of bloggers actually work this way?

[snip]

> 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)

errm, not sure what the rest of the sentence was going to be, but...

I think this is the important area -  (X)HTML is for fairly direct human
consumption, whereas the stuff in RSS requires another level of
interpretation to make sense. The original approach to RSS was as metadata,
and this is the approach taken by RSS 1.0. The approach taken by RSS 2.0
encourages everything to be treated as content for immediate human
consumption, using other formats (such as the god-awful OPML) to handle meta
aspects, and I think this inconsistency in itself hampers progress. That's
without considering the extra obstacles it puts in the way of more
sophisticated applications - machine processing (e.g. automatic aggregation,
filtering, republishing) is made more difficult when the material has been
designed for human consumption.

There is obviously a lot to be said for the pub-sub model of content
provision that the newsreaders use, I'm just not sure that XHTML-RSS is the
way forward.

Cheers,
Danny.