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RE: Postel's law, exceptions

• To: bob@w..., Elliotte Rusty Harold <elharo@m...>
• Subject: RE: Postel's law, exceptions
• From: Rex Brooks <rexb@s...>
• Date: Wed, 21 Jan 2004 06:16:51 -0800
• Cc: bob@w..., xml-dev@l...
• In-reply-to: <200401210705.AOD50942@m...>
• References: <200401210705.AOD50942@m...>

I wish y'all would change your subject line when you veer off like 
this. I have been deleting these posts for a week now, and I only 
opened this one to see why the bleep the thread was still hanging on. 
This goes for general practice more than this one thread, which was 
poorly id'd in the first place. This makes it difficult for those of 
us who subscribe to way too many lists to be fairly certain that we 
catch important discussions. RSS is one of those topics that are 
particularly annoying since the technology started out very small, 
focused and useful and is rapidly bloating up under the 
now-seeming-inevitable-onset of scope-creep. It's a case of thematic 
recapitulation that is in grave danger of becoming another corollary 
to Murphy's Law: Any useful IT tool will bloat until it is unusable.

Ciao,
Rex

At 2:05 AM -0500 1/21/04, Bob Wyman wrote:
>Elliote Rusty Harold wrote:
>>  How would you feel about dropping all language elements and
>>  replacing them with xml:lang attributes?
>     It is clear that xml:lang is vastly superior to the
><language> tag of RSS V2.0. xml:lang permits us to identify
>language use with the greatest possible granularity. But,
>what I was trying to do was figure out if there is any way to
>address this problem within the constraints of the RSS V2.0
>specification. Doing otherwise would be creating a new
>specification and that is supposedly the task of Atom...
>
>>an unexpected attribute is a lot less likely to trip
>>people up than an unexpected element.
>     I'm not sure if that is actually the case. There seem to
>be quite a few home grown RSS reading tools that don't use
>XML parsers but rather grep for element tags directly. I'm
>afraid that many of these things would not do too well
>handling a tag with an unexpected attribute. In any case, the
>only way to find out is to give it a try and see what
>breaks... Not pleasant. Life would be easier if people would
>simply learn to use parsers instead of mucking about with the
>bytes directly...
>
>     In other mail, it has been pointed out that the ISO
>language codes include "mul" (multiple) and "und"
>(undetermined). Thus, what I was suggesting in my earlier
>note (new tags i-unknown and i-mixed) is unnecessary.
>However, RFC3066 specifically recommends against either mul
>or und except in cases where there is no other choice. While
>it might, on occaision, be "necessary" to use "und" even with
>xml:lang, it seems to the use of "mul" would be very rare if
>only because xml:lang allows you to change the language code
>when needed. But, given the limitations of RSS V2.0, it might
>be appropriate to use mul in that context. For instance, one
>solution might be to set the RSS <language> tag to "mul" to
>warn processors that the feed contains a mix of languages and
>then use xml:lang tags to flag the specific items with their
>appropriate languages where known. What do you think?
>     Thanks for the input.
>
>       bob wyman
>
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-- 
Rex Brooks
GeoAddress: 1361-A Addison, Berkeley, CA, 94702 USA, Earth
W3Address: http://www.starbourne.com
Email: rexb@s...
Tel: 510-849-2309
Fax: By Request

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  • RE: Postel's law, exceptions
    • From: Bob Wyman <bob@w...>

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