Constructive opinions about RSS:
There are people who are working towards a Semantic Web based on RDF. … There are people who are building a Two-Way-Web, or the Web as a writing and publishing environment … These groups have different needs.
Dave Winer sees two groups with different needs. … I [see] two groups with different blind spots.
It’s only been the recent and ongoing hubbub about the direction of RSS that’s got me wondering what the real truth is about the RDF in RSS.
XML is great about collecting data but is lousy about recording knowledge. There is no facility inherent within the plain vanilla flavor of XML that allows one to write or read assertions in such a way that these assertions … can be machine producable and machine readable. And the machines need all the help they can get.
RSS is a very simple format. The channel element is always going to be a resource … I don’t see why RXSS is not flexible enough to let me keep the RSS structure as-is, while providing the information necessary for constructing an RDF model in an out-of-band file.
One possible implementation of semantic schemas is to convert XML to RDF with XSLT. So I created an XSLT file to convert RSS 0.94/2.0 to RDF.
And finally:
What seems likely to emerge is that we’re going to have three-and-a-half varieties of RSS, but with the saving grace that three of them will be part of RSS 2.0 … 2.0 Lite, 2.0 Rich, and 2.0 Classic.
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© 2001–9 Mark Pilgrim