Re: meta-issue: arbitrary relationships required?

[Robert Sayre <mint@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Danny Ayers wrote:

> Producers and consumers that support RSS
> 1.0's model can uniformly interpret that information. A system
> migrated to Atom without support of this kind would lose a significant
> facility.

The kicker here is that consumers don't support RSS1.0's model because 
it isn't helpful. The tricky part of supporting an extension is writing 
the handler.

> Prior syndication art - RSS 1.0 fully supports it, e.g. there's a
> WordPress plugin to add terms from FOAF to give more info re. topics,
> authors etc:
>
> http://www.wasab.dk/morten/blog/feed/rdf
>
> http://npg.nature.com/npg/servlet/Content?data=xml/02_newsfeed.xml&style=xml/02_newsfeed.xsl

> Atom will (hopefully) have a syntax that will be considered simple.
> There is no suggestion here that it should support a model like RDF,
> just some form of mechanism or convention that will allow it to do a
> reasonable proportion of what RSS 1.0 can do.

Show me an example of a client doing something useful with the 
extensions in those two feeds. Then, tell me why it would be impossible 
or harder in Atom.

Robert Sayre