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Re: [RSS-DEV] Re: [syndication] Time for XHTML-RSS?
Danny Ayers wrote:
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.
The specific use case is providing a stepping stone for content
developers to begin syndicating content. RSS 2.0 is too big a leap for
many of them.
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.
I don't agree. Its minor work on the part of aggregator developers.
Rather than processing the first element of an XML document as an RSS
channel, they need to process the first channel element (or RDF
equivelent) in the document. They don't have to check for valid html or
do anything with the elements that are not RSS that they don't already
do. The aggregators are all in flux now anyway, a good number of them
are still in beta. Now is the time to adding a namespace to RSS 2 or
embedd RSS in HTML .
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.
Whatever goes in RSS, goes in HTML+RSS. RSS aggregators simply find and
RSS channel in an XML document and process it, just like they do now.
People building metadata rich applications should be using RSS 1.0.
That is too big a step. People will cut their teeth on HTS (as I am
currently calling it), progress to using RSS 2, then if their
application warrants it, RSS 1.0. And I hope they will. But RSS 1.0 is
out of reach of most content developers "too technical".
HTML+RSS is, in my opinion, how XHTML was intended to be modularized.
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.
Bandwidth increases will be marginal for most applications. For big
documents, syndicators are going to realize their bandwidth costs are
too high or their users are alienated, and drop in a script on the web
server which returns RSS 2 or 1 when the user-agents indicates it can
accept such, and HTML otherwise.
Bandwidth may even go down. By having a single source, the users
proxy-cache (most people with jobs are behind one) will likely have the
document in cache when the user decides to navigate from their
aggregator to the actual web page.
Most agents request content only when its changed. So polling every
hour isn't going to return a document every hour anyway. Many sites
change every few weeks or only once a day.
The leap from no syndication to the semantic web is too big for most
people to get started. Even the leap to RSS 2 is too big for many
people. I think HTS will be an acceptable stepping stone.
Doug Ransom
Cheers,
Danny.
[1] http://www.w3.org/2001/Annotea/
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