RE: rss, in all its guises

>  They make it effectively impossible to handle RSS with XML 
> > tools. For these reasons, I used RSS as an example of not to design 
> > an XML application in Effective XML.

+1 to that !

RSS supposedly gained adoption, because there were some cool tools for it, there was nothing else better, other people were using it ( who had some useful content ) and it 'appeared' to be in xml; so it was a perfect match with respect to syndicating content. 

Personally, I find it very odd that people herald any particular format as useful, with respect to a vocabulary in xml; if it doesnt fit, one is a transform away to something better.....so the idea that the 'format' of RSS is powerful and useful was and always will be a matter of taste for me. 

On the other hand, the insanity of not conforming to underlying xml standard means that RSS is just one of those 'almost' technologies, that seemed to be the right way....but in the end compromised itself; and now it just looks like an embarressing mistake. No doubt, embarressing mistakes like RSS get used every day all the time in our industry, so arguing the case against RSS is a bit moot, it is a successful technology; but for all its simplicity its typical usage imposes a  barrier to integrating it for no reason.

+1 to DavidP comment that v2.0 does little in the way of explicitly defining constraints on the data model; though it does explicitly state that it must conform to the xml 1.0 ( http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-xml )....now waiting around to see if it happens in the wild is another thing.

RSS should be held up of what happens when we lower our standards with respect to allowing anything less then well formed, valide xml. 

just my 2p, jim fuller


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