Re : Thoughts,questions....

[paul@architek.co.uk]

I've been trying hard to get to grips with the substance of Dave 
Winers issues on RSS1.0 and namespaces. For ease of reference I have 
abbreviated Dave Winers proposal the "expanded core" approach and the 
rdf/namespace approach the "rdf approach"

I think that the rdf approach offers the best route forward, however, 
it needs to be better explained and more attention needs to be given 
to making it easier to use.

The RDF approach needs to answer some valid criticism
=======================================================

There are at least two cogent ones that I can see that people have 
made

1) To enable the average developer to cope, a syndication format must 
be simple to create and be easily read by a human. The rdf approach 
requires too much studying and background knowledge to easily pick up 
and is too hard for humans to read and create manually.

2) RSS should also be easy to parse and create using any software 
environment which developers care to use. Some software environments 
are too weak to handle RDF and the namespace syntax.

To deal with these issues the proposed "expanded core" solution is...

Go for a very simple syntax. Simplicity can only be achieved and 
therefore points 1. and 2. resolved  by adopting a simple  
representation of the metadata in XML. Beyond that the average 
developer cannot cope.

If the RDF approach is to be widely accepted and adopted then 1) and 
2) require solutions. Not all of them may be technical, but better 
software tools support is part of a solution which does not require 
the simple syntax required by the "expanded core". This software 
tools support should span *all* of the environments which people need 
to use... and we shouldn't sneer at people who try to parse this 
stuff in Perl, VB or even, shock horror, Macromedia Flash.

Could it be possible to start some kind of co-ordinated open 
source/community program to share and distribute the tools which are 
available now... and which will be created? Currently there is no 
central clearing house for these things as the technology is fairly 
new. At the moment there is lots of mailing list activity but few 
comprehensive fixed resources.  Yes I know that there are quite a few 
sites where you can download this or that... whats lacking is an open 
umbrella organisation that isn't tainted by some commercial angle.

(The same umbrella organisation/site could also discuss and share the 
RSS extensions which are created... )

 
Control 
========

There was also another agenda underlying some of the postings. That 
is the issue of control and "who gets to decide" what goes in to the 
extended set of attributes in the "expanded core" model.

Who should determine what is and is not "core"? What is so special 
about the attributes which, for example, iSyndicate have developed? 

One of the enormous benefits of a namespaced version of the RSS 
standard is that nobody has to agree to eg: iSyndicates' views. The 
community will decide either by using or not using those particular 
attributes, expressed as that particular namespace.

In other words, a proper metadata syntax such as RDF and namespaces 
preserves and extends the community process by making the core 
standard robust to additions which don't work or aren't generally 
desired by the community.

Following this approach would actually make it impossible for any one 
organisation or individual to decide to split a standard or to 
control it... perhaps this is threatening to some! 

That being said I have to say that there is a big communication issue 
with RDF. Considering that I am an application developer who has 
played around with metadata of one sort or another for the last 15 
years I have not found RDF and some of the related technologies at 
all obvious and easy to grasp. RDF needs a good communicator, 
currently the acolytes of this technology are very academic and fail 
to sell the technology at all well. As one who also receives the RDF-
interest mailing list you definitely get the impression that "he who 
does not understand FOPC should not enter here." That also has to 
change if the rdf approach is going to be successful.

IMHO, as ever

Paul Freeman