RE: [syndication] Is a Feed the right place for your Data?

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

> I'm working on a new Scripting News implementation, and thought
> it would be
> interesting to have each day have its own white-on-orange XML
> button. Click
> on it and you get the RSS representation for that day.
>
> For example:
>
> http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/scriptingArchive/rss/2000/10/31
>
> I've had a folder full of RSS feeds for Scripting News, going back to May
> 2002.
>
> http://www.scripting.com/rssArchive/
>
> But the new one is dynamic, generated on-demand, and goes back to 1997.
>
> So the problem flips around, are these formats, RSS, Atom etc
> only good for
> more than feeds?
>
> My opinion: of course.

It obviously can be done, but the question is whether or not this is the
best approach to delivering the content. Correct me if I'm wrong, but to
access this data it will be necessary to load a page containing the
white-on-orange buttons into a (presumably HTML) browser, get the links from
there and copy them into an RSS reader. I that the per-item metadata (title,
date) has been stripped, so the channel is reduced to something comparable
to a HTML list. So why not have this static content as HTML, linked directly
from the original HTML page? Where do you see the advantage in the RSS-ish
approach?

Cheers,
Danny.