Re: Extensibility in Syndication formats

[Sam Ruby <rubys@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Dan Brickley wrote:
> Extensibility comes at a price, and designing something cleaner and
> better than RDF will be an interesting endeavour. Finding a clean and 
> syntactically graceful way of mapping _into_ RDF also comes at a price, 
> as does (of course) simply using full RDF/XML syntax. The pre-IETF 
> Atom community decided some time ago that they didn't find RDF/XML 
> an attractive proposition, which I guess means we're going the route of 
> defining an extensibility model that is somehow better than RSS 1.0's.

If you were to express that paragraph as a set of assertions, you would 
find something missing.  I'm going to extract a few, please forgive my 
inprecise way of expressing them:

  RSS 1.0 uses RDF.
  RDF addresses some extensibility problems.
  RDF/XML is a serialization syntax for RDF.
  pre-IETF community didn't find the RDF/XML syntax attractive.

What can we conclude from this?

First, for purposes of this discussion, lets not debate the assertion 
that RDF addresses extensibility issues, and simply treat it as a given. 
 And let's assume, again for purposes of discussion, that the AtomPub 
working group is interested in pursing a non-RDF/XML serialization syntax.

Even with all these assumptions, can we conclude that "we're going the 
route of defining an extensibility model that is somehow better than RSS 
1.0's."?

I don't think so.

Hint: there are other serialization syntaxes than RDF/XML.

Further reading:
  http://www.xml.com/pub/a/2003/08/20/dive.html
  http://semtext.org/atom/utils.html
  http://www.w3.org/2004/01/rdxh/spec

- Sam Ruby