Re: RSS as a pseudo Web Service

> 1. Its pretty easy to parse and there are many tools to help

If you're looping through data then it's just data, that it's structured as
items inside an rss element really doesn't make all that much difference.
I'd daresay that it's probably going to be MORE work to cram something into
RSS than to just present it in a relatively direct raw form.

> 2. You can serve 2 or more audiences, so our RSS feed is quite heavy and
> contains information which people can read using a RSS reader or parse
> and use in there own applications.

Err, so why not provide the RSS audience with it's lighter-weight, properly
formatted data, and leave the interchange stuff separate?  If anything,
things like an rdfs:seeAlso URI would be a way to indicate to a "specially
aware" client that additional data is available.  That way you're not
pushing out needlessly bulky data to clients that have no use for it.

> 3. Its very common, so many clients now want RSS over anything else (at
> least thats true in the news market)

As in "when all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail"?  Not a
very good excuse, frankly.

> 4. Enclosures allow for a simple and automated way to collect extra
> content, yes you could run a cron job. But now with a podcatching
> client, extra content can be pulled down by less technical people, in my
> mind this is a good thing.

Which makes huge assumptions about how effectively the clients will or won't
handle the content.  Not all tools will be as smart about ignoring that
content.

But since you're talking about smarter clients on the retrieval side, ones
that will know how to parse out this 'special data' then why bother jamming
it into an RSS feed anyway?

> > As to processing RDF via XSLT you're in for a whole other set of
> > adventures...
> Can I just ask you to explain this point?

RDF in it's full glory can present significant challenges to the limited
ways tools like XSLT are fixated on hierarchical relationships within the
data.  STFW for Simon St. Laurent's adventures in handling FoaF RDF as if it
were XML.  For a simple document it's probably no big deal but for something
that uses rdf:Description constructs it can be a bit convoluted.  Mainly
because XSLT isn't geared to handle RDF's non-hierarchical capabilities.

-Bill Kearney



 
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