Re: RSS 1.1

> I anticipated 1.0.1/1.1 to be max-compatibility bugfix only, so 
this
> this version came as a bit of a surprise. It doesn't seem to have
> direct compatibility beyond being RDF & XML. I won't try to 
speculate
> what this means in the world at large...
> Cheers,
> Danny.

What this means is that we are rapidly approaching the HTML-ization 
of RSS Feeds. To write an aggregator, you currently have to parse--
is it 9?--different feed types. Each of the types has different 
definitions of their elements. In practice, this means having an 
internal list of fields from which to grab the data you display. For 
example, to get the actual message you grab either "text" 
or "dc:content".

I may be wrong, but each different group appears to be creating 
different specifications: this RSS 1.1 group and the Yahoo rss-media 
group and the Atom group. These are just the ones *I* know about off 
the top of my head. I am not really sure if this is how "standards" 
are normally developed or even what a better way would be, besides 
everyone joining forces. Personally, I can see the case for Atom 
(standardizing blog *posting*) and rss-media (enabling much greater 
specification of meta data).

What would be great is a definition of a superset of each of these 
efforts. Is that what RSS 1.1 is? Maybe I missed that.

The best process seems (to me) to be Yahoo's rss-media effort 
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/rss-media/

There, they are providing samples, asking for commentary, and really 
focusing on the *use cases* of the specification. The leader is 
making statements/summaries like:

5. Bittorrent. Do we want to explicity note the difference
of "transport" vs. content type? Does it really matter in the end if
we create media groupings? ("application/x-bittorrent;
enclosed=audio/mpeg")

The rss-media approach seems to be super-focused on how to provide a 
better experience for users/clients and producers/servers as well as 
expanding capability for online aggregators.

Just my take on it.

Greg Smith
Author, FeederReader - The Pocket PC RSS reader and podcatcher
www.FeederReader.com









 
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