Re: [syndication] Re: Thoughts, questions, and issues.

[Eric Bohlman <ebohlman@netcom.com>]

On Thu, 17 Aug 2000 malexander@acm.org wrote:

> RSS 1.0 has lost it. Plain and simple.  The new tag allows the spec
> to kind of almost have it for a single level of depth.  But the
> idea of specific link tags to define a level of hierarchy will
> simply fail when the data has multiple levels of Hierarchy.
> The data I am looking at has about 8 levels of Hierarchy.
> It can easily be encoded in RSS 0.91,  but will fail completely
> with RSS 1.0.
> 
> If this tag structure is required to support RDF, then maybe the
> RDF support should be re-considered.  I dont have any issues with

It's required, AFAIK, to simultaneously support RDF and be
backwards-compatible with RSS 0.90.  I think it's worth taking a look at
the XML-DEV archives and seeing just how many complaints there are about
XML design decisions that were made for backwards-compatibility with
SGML.  In this case, there's even less justification for doing an ugly
design for backwards-compatibility; it was perceived that the success of
XML would depend on the immediate availability of tools to support it, and
back in 1996-7 there was no guarantee that XML-specific tools would be
there on time, and so being able to use the existing SGML tools was seen
as of paramount importance.  But nothing similar is going on with RSS.  A
content provider who wants to supply "new-school" RSS files can always use
XSLT or the like to "down-translate" them into RSS 0.90 for those
subscribers who can't handle anything else.  RDF *does* allow nesting and
sequencing, just not in a way that an RSS 0.90 parser can understand.  I
say come up with a format that uses those facilities; anyone who wants to
use it can provide a "grace period" during which they down-translate.