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Re: [syndication] Re: Thoughts, questions, and issues.
Gary Teter wrote:
>
> on 8/21/00 4:21 PM, Dan Brickley at daniel.brickley@bristol.ac.uk wrote:
>
> > On Mon, 21 Aug 2000, Gary Teter wrote:
> >
> >> RSS is in a lot of ways a "populist" spec. This is a point that's been made
> >> more eloquently before by others, so I won't belabor it here, except to say
> >> that I think the decision to base RSS 1.0 on version 0.9 instead of 0.91
> >> feels kind of "ivory tower" to me.
> >
> > on the contrary, our use of namespaces is there to get _away_ from the
> > "ivory tower" situation where only the maintainers of the core spec get
> > to create / define interesting new stuff. --danbri
>
> I >like< namespaces! And exactly for the reason that you mention. I'm just
> not convinced of the necessity for RDF in content syndication.
>
It's not necessary, but useful. One practical benefit of using
RDF modules to extend RSS is that RDF is a generic way of
graphing data relationships. If people use RDF modules, it will
actually be much easier to grok someone else's RSS module since
it will be represented in the same syntax. It's easier, that is,
compared to RSS modules based on DTDs where the structure will be
uniquely defined by the author. Each DTD module may be completely
different. Hence, having a standard way of representing
extensions will make it easier for programmers and users who are
trying to understand the module. Lastly, most, if not all, XML
parsers can't yet handle validating XML when it's importing a
namespace and using another DTD. There may be a way of doing
this, I've never done it though.
> If you're saying that namespaces requires the use of RDF, then by all means
> let's go that route. But I don't believe that's true.
>
Namespaces don't require RDF. They are entirely separate issues,
though RDF does certainly use namespaces. In fact, we could have
kept RSS 0.91 and just suggested the use of namespaces. See my
previous post on a reason why we went to 0.9.
--
Jonathan Eisenzopf | http://motherofperl.com
eisen@pobox.com | http://perlxml.com
Perl Hacker | http://dc.pm.org