Sam wants namespaces

Tuesday, 22 April 2003

Sam proposes some changes to RSS 2.0 regarding namespaces. My first question was, “why?” but upon reading his next post, I get it.

The Big Problem with namespaces the first time around was that it broke some software, which Dave is very sensitive to. Fair enough.

So, there are a few ways to go about this;

1) change it in the Internet-Draft - but that wouldn’t be RSS2.0, it’d be something else, and I’m quite loath to introduce Yet Another Syndication Format.

2) do RSS 2.1 - ditto.

3) Dave adds a namespace to RSS2.0 - don’t think this will happen, but we can always ask!

4) define an RSS2.0 namespace that ONLY gets used when it’s embedded.

I think the last one is the right approach - if Dave is amenable. How about it, Dave? Sam?

2 Comments

Sam Ruby said:

Don’t rule out #3. I worked closely with Dave on RSS 2.0, and to a reasonable degree the amount of namespace support that exists in 2.0 is based on my persistance.

I argue that YASF and 2.1 are not necessary. One can already extend 2.0 in this manner with or without Dave Winer or anyone elses approval. That’s the beauty of namespaces. However, broad acceptance and adoption is still vital to the success. That’s where Dave, you, me, Don, and others template and aggregator authors come in.

I’m not in favor of #4. Make the namespace available and optional. Yes, people who code that consumes RSS feeds will have to handle both sets of identical elements. But I argue that such code is not difficult.

Tuesday, April 22 2003 at 11:19 AM

Mark said:

cf. http://www.intertwingly.net/blog/797.html , http://www.intertwingly.net/blog/799.html , and http://www.intertwingly.net/blog/801.html .

Tuesday, April 22 2003 at 11:46 AM

mark nottingham