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[XML-DEV Mailing List Archive Home] [By Thread] [By Date] [Recent Entries] [Reply To This Message] Re: rss regularis(z)ation
 Elliotte Rusty Harold wrote: > > Except that RSS isn't XML. It claims to be, but in practice it isn't, > and many members of the RSS community are radically opposed to making > it real XML, with draconian error handling and markup encoded as > markup. If RSS is one of the few real successes we cam point to, then > something's seriously wrong with XML. I think that RSS as practiced has the key properties that power XML -- elements, attributes, and text, deliniated with simple markup. IMHO it's the "self-describing" element tags and embedded metadata attribute-value pairs that seem to give the SGML-derived languages like HTML and RSS their real power in non-geek communities.... enabled by people doing a View Source and using what they see as a template for what they want. It's also interesting that both HTML and RSS products are notoriously non-draconian in practice. Also, RSS should be a poster child for XML namespaces, because everyone and his dog wants to extend it but keep the core syntax / semantics. Instead, namespaces are (as Danny Ayers points out elsewhere, can't remember where offhand) one of the principal cleavage points in the RSS world. Are those resisting namespaces just being stupid/stubborn, or are they the "canaries in the coalmines" dropping over from the toxic namespace fumes? I don't know ... but I hear the sound of people voting with their feet. Maybe the XML Supreme Court should steal the election and suspend civil rights until this non-orthodoxy is corrected :-) But seriously, this challenges the XML world to show that the namespace spec really adds more benefit than cost in the real world, or to clean it up until it does. Does all this indicate "something seriously wrong with XML"? Certain aspects of RSS practice (such as the casual disregard for well-formedness and the bizarre practice of CDATA-escaping random HTML-ish text) certainly give me the willies. But I think the RSS developers (mostly) see that this takes them to the edge of a very slippery slope with nasty rocks at the bottom, and are trying to edge back from it. So, they are easily exploiting the most powerful bits of XML and can be taught about best practice when it comes to the harder bits. I see the thrashing attempts of the RSS people to use XML -- and the work of the J2ME people to figure out what bits of the XML corpus are valuable enough to fit into a constrained device, for that matter -- as evolutionary experiments to learn from rather than heresies to stamp out. 
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