RSS-Data, it Keeps Going and Going

Kellan — Tue, 07 Oct 2003 09:06:00 +0000

There are 2 reasons to use RSS 2.0, one is you really like Dave Winer, and you think it is important to stroke his ego, the other is that you’re scared of RDF. So when Marc says:

Yes – we know that RDF can do many of the things RSS-Data was designed for. But (believe it or not) it really has nothing to do with RSS 1.0 at all. RSS-Data is about extending RSS 2.0. OK? Not RSS 1.0.

I’m kind of surprised.

We obviously can’t be wanting RSS-Data to do just the same thing as RDF otherwise, presumably, one would just use RSS 1.0; after all no one seems to be arguing that RSS-Data does a better job then RDF at the arbitrary structuring of data game. But at some fundamental level, (and having watched the RSS scene for a number of years now I should expect it) I’ve just never really accepted the idea that there are really that many people who care about Dave Winer’s ego. It just makes no sense.

Now don’t get me wrong, I’m not the world’s biggest fan of RDF, I don’t think it magically solves all problems. Partially because I’m not sold on the idea of arbitrary data structures, an approach that seems to me to constantly defer the hard work in favor of the quick prototype. (a point Les explores in his “I got my schema from Amazon, where did your’s comes from?” post) But if you’re going to do it, then at least do it right.

Or as Tom put it so well:

Those Who Don’t Learn RDF Will Be Forced to Reimplement It

RSS-Data: Perhaps Not the Best Idea Ever

Kellan — Sat, 04 Oct 2003 06:58:00 +0000

Jeremey Allaire has proposed RSS-Data, an attempt to wedge XML-RPC serialization into RSS, an idea which is so phenomenally bad, and wrong headed, I’m momentarily speechless. (At least of anything I would say in public)

The joy, however, of being behind the curve is someone else has already said it for you.

Whats all that noise?

Les has put together examples of RSS with namespaces vs. RSS-Data; examples that I think speak for themselves (the RSS-Data example is so spaghetti, and loose it gives me the willies just looking at it [or maybe that is my OPML "we'll just cram everything in all which way, like, in poorly defined attributes that we make up as we go along" flashback kicking in]).

Been Done, Been Done Better, Already Part of RSS

But if they aren’t speaking to you as clearly (and I’ll admit the voices in my head are particularly loud and clear tonight), you might see if Danny’s Um, we’ve had that for 3 years it’s called RDF, and it works much better, makes it any clearer.

Ah, Running Code

So technologically it sucks, but what about this supposed ease of use?
See parsing RSS-Data vs. parsing RSS namespaces, and compare these 2 samples for readability.

The Macromedia Way?

Allaire speaks about a new crop of aggregators that could be extended to solve domain specific problems, and new formats of RSS-Data. All I can say is, namespaces, RDF, and XML…Hello?

He also mentions how wonderful it would be to get all this stuff into Flash, and Java, and that Macromedia Central might be a great container for this stuff, to which I can only say, “What can you expect from the man who gave us ColdFusion!” (literally, this is the same spirit that I think ColdFusion embodies in all it’s hackish, kludgy, kind of uncomfortable with intermediate concepts in computer science, proprietary way)