Re: "Role of RSS in Science Publishing"

[Robert Sayre <mint@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Ben Lund wrote:

> That depends entirely on the application you have in mind.  For end- 
> aggregators, it's mostly fine that they can ignore things they don't 
> understand.  But what about aggregating intermediaries?  Unless there's 
> a defined extensibility model, there's a large chance that the extra 
> data in the exensions that the aggregator doesn't understand will be 
> lost.  RDF in RSS 1.0 make this a very simple problem to solve, whereas 
> arbitrary XML namespaces makes it fiendishly difficult.

Could you show us an example? I'm having a hard time understanding why 
the intermediary could pass on blobs of (X)HTML but not blobs of XML.

I also don't understand why including rdf:RDF in atom:entry is 
insufficient. You'd have to consume it with an RDF parser and it would 
come in a container that isn't RDF itself, but I don't see a problem. It 
would eliminate the people pretending to use RDF that actually 
aren't--they remind me of American teenagers who get tatoos featuring 
chinese glyphs.

Robert Sayre