RSS Profile Draft 1.21 Published

A significant draft of the RSS Profile has just been published:

http://www.rssboard.org/rss-profile

The To-Do list is now empty, meaning the document covers everything 
we're hoping to cover in the first version of this document.

After the newest changes have been vetted, we'd like to devote at 
least a week to a careful read and testing, then propose the profile 
to the RSS Advisory Board on July 1.

If you have additional things you'd like to see in the profile, 
submit draft text here on RSS-Public and test your advice in all of 
these aggregators: Bloglines, BottomFeeder, FeedDemon, Microsoft 
Internet Explorer 7, Mozilla Firefox 2.0, My Yahoo, NewsGator Online 
and Opera 9.

If you're an aggregator developer and you'd like your software to be 
included in our primary tests, please test all of the recommendations 
in the profile and report the results here, preferably by June 25. I 
can help you create suitable tests.

Changes in draft 1.21:

1. Clarified namespace support per the recent board vote by 
adding "and attributes" to the first sentence in this graf:

"All elements and attributes in an RSS feed that are not defined in a 
namespace MUST be described in the specification. None of the 
restrictions described in the specification apply to elements or 
attributes defined in a namespace."

http://www.rssboard.org/rss-profile#introduction

2. The Character Data section has been extended to deal with text 
that describes HTML markup, text that looks like HTML markup, and 
double escaping:

http://www.rssboard.org/rss-profile#data-types-characterdata

3. The namespace element channel-dc:language was not added.

Users of this element are using the same language codes as channel-
language, so there's no need to use the namespace element. However, 
this element's popularity in RSS feeds appears to be due to one 
implementer with two popular publishing tools. I'd rather work with 
that implementer on switching to channel-language than add 
dc:language to the profile. 

4. The namespace element channel-dc:date and item-dc:date also was 
not added.

The profile already contains this advice, which has been moved to the 
Namespace Elements intro:

"When a namespace element duplicates the functionality of an element 
defined in RSS, the core element SHOULD be used."

http://www.rssboard.org/rss-profile#namespace-elements

The dc:date element has wide support in RSS because it's the 
recommended date format in RSS 1.0. I'm not aware of any aggregators 
that can handle RSS 2.0 but can't handle dc:date.

The only reason to suggest that publishers use pubDate in preference 
to dc:date is covered already in the Namespace intro.

5. The atom:link section has been shortened to exclude documentation 
that isn't relevant to RSS 2.0 publishers.

http://www.rssboard.org/rss-profile#namespace-elements-atom-link



 
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