Re: RSS as a pseudo Web Service

Indeed, why bother wrapping it in RSS at all?  If all you're passing is RDF
data then why not simply pass it using REST principles?  Just pull the data
via HTTP.

But let's step back, is there some other parallel reason for wanting to use
RSS?  When using RSS-1.0 it's entirely possible to 'carry along' all manner
of other data.  Only an RDF-aware application would bother paying attention
to it.  It'd be 'perfectly safe' to do it from the perspective of not
disrupting RSS client behaviors.  One downside would be wasted bandwidth.
Why bother cramming extra data into the feed when no normal feed processing
tool would consume it?  I'm not talking basic metadata like timestamps or
category data as more of that would certainly help.  But other stuff pulled
by a ton of RSS clients would waste the bandwidth on both ends.

If it's private data (not intended for public subscriptions) and you've got
reasonable controls over the client-side users then bandwidth probably isn't
much of an issue, other than waste-not/want-not principles of course.

As to processing RDF via XSLT you're in for a whole other set of
adventures...

-Bill Kearney
Syndic8.com


> I'd recommend against it. You're assumedly going to have a server at one
end
> that's not going to be an RSS server, a client at the other end that's not
> going to be an RSS client, so why use RSS for the protocol between the
two?
>
> If you really think the RSS protocol fits your needs perfectly and you're
> not just stuffing your data into RSS because you don't want to come up
with
> a format of your own, at least give it a different top level element so
you
> don't run the risk of someone coming across your feed and trying to
> subscribe to it.
>
> bgranam wrote:
> > I've been musing about the possibility of using RSS as a kind of
> > pseudo Web Service and would like some opinions on the concept.
> >
> > RSS would be used as a transport layer for arbitrary RDF content
> > between two or more computers. The RDF content would not be intended
> > for direct display, but would be parsed out with XSLT and fed into
> > another program for further processing.
> >
> > Good, bad, stupid, brilliant? Your thoughts would be appreciated.



 
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