[XML-DEV Mailing List Archive Home] [By Thread] [By Date] [Recent Entries] [Reply To This Message] Re: Great piece on RSS
They *are* one format Bryan -- and designed to be that way. A 0.91 file is also a valid 0.92 file which is also a valid 2.0 file. This has a very important practical feature -- it means that current aggregators can read the new format. That seems to be borne out, btw, our 2.0 feeds are being read by aggregators that know nothing about 2.0. No problems to report so far. (Praise Murphy.) Not sure what the rest of this means. If you're saying that the spec mirrors practice, even trails it, and therefore contains no breakthroughs, I'd be inclined to agree. Not totally, there have been some enhancements that weren't anticipated by the market. Also note that with 2.0 it's frozen now. Since it supports namespaces, anyone can add to it, and modulo clarifcations to the 2.0 spec (these are anticipated in the Roadmap) RSS is finally finished and ready to deploy. (Only 3.5 years after deployment started.) Dave ----- Original Message ----- From: "bryan" <bry@i...> To: <xml-dev@l...> Sent: Wednesday, October 09, 2002 2:04 AM Subject: RE: Great piece on RSS Well, it doesn't seem to me that it's argument for RSS as an evolving format holds water, in praising evolving systems he says that such systems improve with each stage of their evolution, but most of the deficiencies he lists are in fact found in the format now because the format has 'evolved'! It's a clever trick to act as though RSS 0.9x/2.0 is one format, which is what his premise seems built on, but the whole point of argumentation I've read recently seems to be that woah, my feeds are being broken. So when he says: "it's pretty obvious that of the various implementations of a worldwide syndication format, we have the worst one possible. Except, of course, for all the others." What does that mean? Does it mean that RSS 2.0 is superior to all those others, or does it mean that any possible confluence of tags under the Nom de Markup of RSS is superior to anything not so monikered? When he says: "The very weaknesses that make RSS so infuriating to serious practitioners also make it possible in the first place" does this mean that the weakness: "After years of worldwide deployment, it would completely reverse its add-whatever-you-want extensibility rules in favor of namespaces, which the spec would neither define nor elaborate on" which is a very recent wrinkle in RSS's evolution, can somehow be taken as a cause of RSS being so widespread and hence a proof of it's superiority vis-à-vis other formats? Note that most of the weaknesses presented are one's found in the phantastical format RSS 0.9x/2.0 and that these weaknesses would, if traced to their originating point in that two-headed monstrosity the article supposes, be found in RSS 2.0, specifically weaknesses 2,3,4, and 6{I know that with RSS 0.92 you could use entity encoded HTML, case in point Jon Udell's rss feed: http://radio.weblogs.com/0100887/categories/rss/rss.xml but it seems like it's becoming more of a 'what a great idea' scenario with RSS 2.0} are RSS 2.0 weaknesses that would still be considered problematic whether or not we ever chose to compare the format with RSS 0.9x I mean really, this is a necessity cleverly disguised as a weakness: " It would encourage use of entity-encoded HTML in its most important element, thus ensuring both security risks and unpredictable display for the end user" because of course: "Allowing encoded HTML in description let publishers reuse both their existing content and the existing RSS infrastructure" and " Social mores, rather than technical rules, prevent producers from intentionally introducing security risks through malicious script tags or unpredictable display through unclosed HTML elements. " how about social mores prevent publishers from including HTML that will not be equally supported across all browsers, how about Technical limitations keep them from preventing it? How about I want to use your RSS for some sort of Mobile phone display, AvantGO, or what have you, but your encoded HTML prevents me - or more likely I just parse your encoded HTML out (which is what I will do with any feed I get with encoded HTML in it) and your feed runs the risk of becoming nonsensical, take a look at the link above to the rss newsfeed - consider that you may have gone through the trouble of building something that works in all browser that come to you, older browsers gracefully degrade, text based browsers get legible text you've done everything right(a very iffy scenario true but a real possibility with an xml backed site) now you're gonna support RSS - do you want to risk that feed presented above? This is a strength imposed by evolution. This list of deficiencies is then presented as a list of necessities, the whole proof being the success of RSS as an evolving format. I wonder, can anyone help me with this, my knowledge of the biological sciences is not that great - Has any species under the pressures of evolution ever gone extinct? ----------------------------------------------------------------- The xml-dev list is sponsored by XML.org <http://www.xml.org>, an initiative of OASIS <http://www.oasis-open.org> The list archives are at http://lists.xml.org/archives/xml-dev/ To subscribe or unsubscribe from this list use the subscription manager: <http://lists.xml.org/ob/adm.pl>
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