Re: RSS as a pseudo Web Service

So generally you would disagree with RSS as a web API? like how Greg 
describes it? [1]

Realistically if you look at the average RSS feed from a blog with full 
text content and roughly 10-15 items, you can easily break the 50k mark. 
My current RSS 1.0 feed for my blog [2] is 85.07 kB

Clients will be client, is what I tend to say. I've seen clients throw 
errors on Dublin core metadata, subsets of escaped HTML in the 
description, xml:lang, etc etc. I don't believe this is a good enough 
reason to stop adding additional content to a RSS feed. In my 
experience, people will change clients if one does not work for them, 
specially if you suggest one.

I fear I may be going off topic, but weight and clients should not stand 
in the way of a person wanting to syndicate more content than a short 
line of descriptive text. Namespaces and RSS extensions are really 
useful and give people the chance to build upon well thought out 
schema's, instead of reinventing the wheel serving it over REST. Its 
reassuring to know that in every service online, there will be a RSS 
feed which has a certain base level of content and structure. I believe 
this is also why RDF is preferred over plain XML in some circles.

In regards to RDF parsing, I have noticed odd things with RDF parsing 
with XSL but nothing major. But the most complex RDF I've had to parse 
is FOAF. I'm interested to know more about the problems people face with 
RDF parsing in XSL.

Cheers,

Ian Forrester - Cubicgarden.com

[1] - http://www.blogdigger.com/blog/2005/09/07/1126069971000.html
[2] - http://www.cubicgarden.com/blojsom/blog/cubicgarden/?flavor=rdf
> 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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> Yahoo! Groups Links
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