RE: [RSS-DEV] Re: [syndication] Time for XHTML-RSS?

["Danny Ayers" <danny666@virgilio.it>]

> But I see this the other way round - annotating XHTML (and HTML) with
> syndication elements.

This is an interesting take on it. Considered as inline annotations, the
RSS-in-XHTML seems a great idea. It might be worth reconsidering the Annotea
[1] work in the context of RSS.

But my concern is that the motivation for XHTML-RSS seems to be a specific
use case: the viewing of XHTML pages in aggregators.

I think this could cause problems in at least three ways :

1. it demands significant extra work on the part of aggregator developers -
another potentially dirty format to support. I'd be interested to hear how
much toolbuilders have accepted inline-XHTML (xhtml:body for the content) in
RSS readers, and how far they have got in supporting it  - like CSS, object
embedding, scripting etc etc.

2. further blurring of the edge between content and information about that
content. How consistent is the world of XHTML+RSS going to be? To me it
looks like it could easily go the way of HTML in the wild, anything goes.
Which means it will be even harder to get the machine-readable metadata out
of the stuff, harder for tasks like cataloguing that should be enabled by
RSS.

3. the issue of transport infrastructure. Smart tools (which we can soon
have) will realise from the metadata and user interactions which content
they need, *prior* to pulling that content off the web. If the metadata is
embedded in the content (or vice versa) this simply isn't an option. Even if
only a small percentage of feeds are like this, given the increase in
aggregator most of us anticipate, at say 50 feeds a user polled every hour -
it's a huge **unnecessary** added bandwidth demand.

Cheers,
Danny.

[1] http://www.w3.org/2001/Annotea/