[XML-DEV Mailing List Archive Home] [By Thread] [By Date] [Recent Entries] [Reply To This Message] RE: rss regularis(z)ation
> >Just so. While the RSS developer community may be a terrifying mess > >-- stilettos in everyone's back and all that -- RSS as a spec (or > >family of specs) is one of the few real successes XML can point to: > >information in XML actually distributed online to lots of users. > > 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. This is a considerable oversimplification. For a start, which version are you talking about? RSS 1.0 is RDF/XML, so the normal rules don't apply there anyway... Jeff Barr has some version usage stats (from Syndic8) [1] : 0.91 : 47% 1.0 : 26% 2.0 : 14% 0.92 : 11% A moderate proportion of the 0.91/0.92 feeds are iffy XML. The same applies to RSS 2.0, the version that has just gone to Harvard. This is backwards compatible with the 0.9x branch. (Incidentally, 2.0 adds an novel <guid> element which is either a string or a URI depending on the value of one of its attributes). These formats were marketed as "simple" and so lots of people implemented based on a casual "View Source". The 0.9x/2.0 specs are thin and vague, and things like validation (XML Schema, DTD) were swept under the carpet, although Sam Ruby and Mark Pilgrim went to the trouble of putting together an online feed validator not too long ago. Sam recently estimated that a little over 80% of feeds are well-formed. RSS 1.0 feeds can also be checked using RDF validators, btw. It all may sound bad, but this material is mostly content, so compare these figures with the quality of (X)HTML there is around. But the real point is that there's a lot of good stuff around. Nearly all RSS feeds (all versions) are machine-generated, so they tend to be usually right or usually wrong. A useful proportion of these feeds *are* well-formed XML, a fair proportion can be validated, a fair proportion are valid RDF/XML. The proportion of end user tool-generated RSS is increasing all the time (over hacker's bedsit-generated), this will usually be as good XML as whichever spec/library has been chosen allows. But look at what it provides. There are maybe hundreds of thousands of RSS feeds to choose from, for me to read in my little desktop aggregator. It works very well, saves me the trouble of browsing to the 100 or so frequently updated sites I look at most mornings (I simply wouldn't do this otherwise). Quite often there'll be a glitch in a feed or two, 404 or can't parse, but this isn't a big problem. If some of the fruit has gone off, you just stick with the stuff that hasn't. Another point is that rapid development is taking place - the data can be used directly as RDF (RSS 1.0) or translated with XSLT or programmatically. It can and is being used alongside information expressed using other RDF vocabularies (e.g. FOAF in the new TypePad blog publishing system and the NewsMonster reader). RSS may sometimes be awful, but most of the time it's useful XML, it's a good use of the web, and some of it is already part of the Semantic Web. It's very useful and it's mostly XML. Sounds a promising start. Cheers, Danny. http://dannyayers.com/index.rdf [1] http://www.syndic8.com/stats.php?Section=rss
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