Re: Behind the times

"Hammond, Tony" <T.Hammond-F/0MNWz/[email protected]> wrote:
>Oh, but I don't understand this. They are AFAICT working completely _within_
>the standard framework - or did I miss something? (I quite often do.:)
>Whether a particular app is responsive enough or sensitive to the data
>payload within an RSS 1.0 feed is really up to the app. The principles of
>RSS 1.0 are very clear. And IMHO much to be welcomed. Where else can we look
>for extensibility?
>
>The post was only a mild joshing. I only meant to convey the sentiment: "Job
>well done!". Seems to me that Guardian Unlimited is _ahead_ of the times.

And well done to them.

But. This issue of using namespaces for extensibility but without 
support in aggregators is important. There is a sense here in which RDF 
is "write only data". Yes, you can express more and more semantic 
concepts in RDF. But if nobody can read it or tries to read it, what 
have you achieved? Or is it a good thing to load up the file with more 
and more metadata because somebody, one day, will try and make sense of 
it and make inferences from it?

Take this one instance of <dc:subject> used for categories. How many 
feeds use it? How many aggregators read it and display it? Is any 
attempt made to standardise the category labels (after del.icio.us maybe 
this isn't necessary)? Can I turn the base URL and the category and turn 
it back into a URL for just that category? Even though 
http://blogs.guardian.co.uk/news/archives/cat_uk_news.html is a 
logically constructed URL, I don't see it in the RDF.

My preference would be for
http://blogs.guardian.co.uk/news/index.rdf
http://blogs.guardian.co.uk/news/cat_uk_news/index.rdf

You could still put in all the dc terms, but that would make it possible 
for existing aggregators to take single categories.

-- 
Julian Bond Email&MSM: julian.bond at voidstar.com
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