Re: We don't need RSD

[Sjoerd Visscher <sjoerd@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

> Furthermore, the claims from client vendors that "we should stick with 
> RSD because we can already parse it" are specious at best.  You *will* 
> need to write code to parse the introspection file in any case; the 
> information it contains can not simply be shoved into an RSD file, and 
> even if it could, you would have to write additional code above and 
> beyond your existing code to parse it.  It's just a lot more information 
> than you get with other APIs; all of it is justified in the spec and you 
> need to parse it one way or the other.  Meanwhile, you've already 
> written the code to look for arbitrary LINK tags in HTML, since you're 
> doing that already to find the RSD.  Finding the LINK tag that points to 
> the introspection file is what, one more line of code?  You've already 
> spent more time arguing about it than it would take to code it.

I've never used RSD, but one simple look at the spec shows that this is 
all nonsense. The introspection file is just a list of api-name/api-url 
pairs. RSD can do this perfectly. So you *really* don't have to do any 
extra parsing.

The result would be a lot longer (I think each line in the introspection 
file should be a service), but you get good versioning support back for 
that. The name of the blogId attribute is also a it unfortunate. These 
two tiny drawbacks would give the result a somewhat unprofessional 
feeling. If people have problems with that, they should just say so.

--
Sjoerd Visscher
http://w3future.com/weblog/