Dare Obasanjo on RSS-Data:
I had originally planned to ignore the proposal along with the ensuing interest in the format that sprang up in a few weblogs but after seeing an article about RSS-Data in EWeek which attempts to legitimize what is basically a bad idea I decided to go ahead and post a critique of the proposal.
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The bottom line is that it is hard to see how Jeremy Allaire’s proposal is any better than the status quo and in many ways it is worse.
Dare and I don’t always agree, but in this case I couldn’t have said it any better. The RSS-Data proposal takes the god-awful (IMHO) XML-RPC serialization format, and pushes it into RSS feeds. And at the end of the day, you’re no better off than you are with RSS extensions, except that it’s harder to read, and more difficult to parse.
Les Orchard has also posted (1, 2, 3, 4) about RSS-Data, with some examples.
I don’t get it…if the goal is to get aggregators to understand arbitrary extensions, this doesn’t help. Not at all. The client still needs to know what the information is…changing the serialization format used isn’t relevant to solving that problem. We’ve already seen lots of namespaced RSS extensions, with more coming. This is the right way to extend a XML document – create a namespace, and put your new elements into it. It’s not rocket science.
So what haven’t we seen eye to eye on?
PS: What do you think of the ideas at http://www.gotdotnet.com/community/messageboard/Thread.aspx?id=151520
The only thing that comes to mind was something about some nasty HTML that we were generating for a while…but I eventually saw the light. ;-)
I’ve replied privately on post you point to.
http://www.rassoc.com/gregr/weblog/archive.aspx?post=669…[more]
Greg: RSS-Data is unquestionably harder got a human to read than a namespaced extension. But parsing it is incredibly simple, given the wealth of pre-existing libraries.
I agree that RSS 2.0 already has the extensibility required to achieve the goals of RSS-Data as I’ve already noted (http://allierogers.typepad.com/01/2003/10/radioweblogscom.html).
In fact, our experience, here, as documented Greg’s own Triple Point case study (http://www.newsgator.com/news/archive.aspx?post=17), proves it.
Greg Reinacker’s Weblog – RSS-Data I’m with Greg. Why reinvent the wheel. My full comments are contained in my original post, here….[more]
Roger, take a look at Item #3 in this post from Les. I’d sure rather write the xpath for the namespaced version, rather than the rss-data version…