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

[Jonathan Eisenzopf <eisen@pobox.com>]

zac wrote:
> 
> 
> These sorts of assumptions are self fulfilling to a degree. If you write a
> spec assuming that some users won't interact with it then they won't.
> 
> This limits the number of people that will use the format.
> 
> Look at VRML. Aside from the other problems it had it suffered from a lack
> on understanding of the desires and needs of casual or less experienced
> users.
> 
> And in the end I think this killed it more effectively than any other
> problem it had.
> 
> Compare that to HTML.
> 
> People want to (and should) understand the technologies that they use. So
> when you build a format that puts required namespace declarations in the
> <channel> tag then I think you've gone down a path that isn't going to be
> followed by as many people.
> 
> So I guess it depends on what you want to build. A format for specialist use
> or a format for broad usage.

This is an interesting issue that I'd like to hear more opinions
on. I think the goal is to make it simple for those crafting XML
by hand and extensible for programmers (and writers) who need the
power to extend it. This is an extremely hard balancing act as
we've already seen. As more tutorials and materials surface on
the RSS 1.0 proposal, I think that both writers and programmers
will begin to appreciate the simplicity and extensibility. RSS is
a general format, but it can be extended to be specialized via
modules.

As a matter of comparison, I would like to present 3 other XML
standards used for newspapers, news wires, etc..

XMLNews - http://www.xmlnews.org
News Industry Text Format (NITF) XML - http://www.nitf.org
NewsML - http://www.iptc.org/NMLIntro.htm
DocBook - http://www.docbook.org

The above are writing formats for text documents. XMLNews Meta is
similar to RSS. It also contains a format to markup the full
story. These formats are for writers, but I suspect that writers
are using tools like WordPerfect or an XML editor to do the
actual writing. On a side note, I am a writer as well as a
programmer. I'm using DocBook to write articles and a book. I use
emacs, but would prefer a good XML editor if I could afford one.

So, in comparison to the above formats, I think RSS 1.0 is much
easier to understand. Still, I'm interested to know how people
are working with RSS now. Are you using a tool or writing it by
hand?

I will create a poll and see what happens.

-- 
Jonathan Eisenzopf    |  http://motherofperl.com    
eisen@pobox.com       |  http://perlxml.com
Perl Hacker           |  http://dc.pm.org