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RE: Postel's law, exceptions

• To: <xml-dev@l...>
• Subject: RE: Postel's law, exceptions
• From: "Danny Ayers" <danny666@v...>
• Date: Thu, 15 Jan 2004 18:27:52 +0100
• Importance: Normal
• In-reply-to: <6A0EE7CA-4778-11D8-8ADE-000A95CCC59E@x...>

> On Jan 15, 2004, at 10:19 AM, James Robertson wrote:
>
> >>    In a world where Atom is stillborn, this whole discussion is moot.
> >
> > There's a practical problem with this idea - most aggregators already
> > deal with RSS, and have started adding support for the early Atom
> > formats.  As an aggregator author, I can tell you that using a
> > separate framework for dealing with Atom is not a likely scenario; I'm
> > using the same code to deal with Atom that I use to deal with RSS.  As
> > such, it has leniency for things (like illegal characters) for both
> > RSS and Atom.  I suspect that other aggregator authors either are or
> > will be in the same boat; asking people to maintain different sets of
> > rules for the two formats will seem odd to end users, and require some
> > level of extra work on the part of authors.  This is a 'facts on the
> > ground' problem - what do you suggest as a solution?
>
>    I thought that Atom was intended for a different audience, or at
> least use case, than the various flavors of RSS -- those who needed the
> security of a fairly formal and authoritative spec, those that wanted
> to treat the data as XML rather than tag soup.

I'd say it is a different use case, especially when you consider the Atom
API. At the closest point, RSS could be seen as a prototype for Atom.

For myself I want to do the kind of stuff RSS 1.0 promised (being RDF) but
is unlikely to be able to deliver thanks to the mess of RSS variants. The
marketing of RSS 2.0 was largely based on (selective)
backwards-compatibility and simplicity, leading to confusion and laxity
respectively, making it the last nail in the coffin of well-formed RSS as
the rule.

fyi, my own app currently sends non-RDF RSS through a stylesheet to get RSS
1.0, though this does suffer somewhat from the semantic distortions you
suggested earlier. (I'm actually looking at a much more liberal front end
using JC's TagSoup, trying harder to get good stuff out, but this will only
be for RSS - the Atom receiver will follow the Atom spec).

I had hoped that as Atom is essentially a resource description language the
Resource Description Framework would have been used directly in the form of
RDF/XML. As it is the syntax will be different but (fingers crossed) the
specification will be clear and well enough designed that a formal, standard
(possibly even normative) mapping to RDF will be possible. Couple more
stylesheets required, no big deal.

If it is just RSS 2.5
> with a different name for various reasons that we needn't go into, I
> agree that there is not much point in asking people to treat it as
> something conceptually different, requiring new code or new attitudes.

Some participants in the Atom project believe that it is/should be RSS 2.5
relabelled, despite there be significant qualitive differences on the table.
It's an odd kind of circular reasoning - "Atom should use tag soup parsers
to be like RSS...Atom is like RSS because it's just about parsing tag soup"
(many variants).

Cheers,
Danny.

• References:
  • Re: Postel's law, exceptions
    • From: Michael Champion <mc@x...>

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