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Re: RSS extensibility


Thanks for the example--very clear. It seems to me that there are two ways to look at this:

1) To a human looking at the XML (at least to one who doesn't see through RDF-colored lenses (which, BTW, is in no way intended as a pejorative--maybe it's everyone else's lenses that are colored)), I think it's intuitively obvious that it's the embargo date of the entry.
2) However, technically, nothing in the spec explicitly says that that's the case.

I suspect that #2 is important to many of us, but that many others of us don't care about #2, because #1 is sufficient for us. I also suspect that the former will not be made to cease caring and that the latter will not be made to begin caring by any amount of discussion. This brings us back to the question of how to serve the needs of both groups. Can Atom be made RDF (or can we agree that it already is RDF...and can RDF processing tools handle it as such) with minimal syntactic overhead and no risk of XML structure requiring an RDF-aware parser? Or (ignoring the possibility of other approaches) can we make Atom extremely easy to convert to RDF without ambiguity like what is mentioned below?

On Friday, January 7, 2005, at 06:48 AM, Danny Ayers wrote: 
In the interests of clarification, consider this pseudo-Atom snippet,
with an extension:

<feed "http://purl.org/atom/ns#
xmlns:prism="http://prismstandard.org/namespaces/1.2/basic/";>

<entry>
   <prism:embargoDate>2005-02-15</prism:embargoDate>
...
</entry>

</feed>

Looking at the PRISM spec (which the namespace qualification identifies) -
[[
embargoDate
Earliest date (potentially including time) the resource may be used
according to the rights agreement, or clause in the rights agreement.
]]

So the human meaning of an 'embargoDate' element is reasonably clear.
The problem is that with RSS 2.0's approach to extensibility, there is
no relationship defined between this element and any part of the feed
data. Ok, it's an embargo date. But the embargo date of what?

On the other hand, following the RSS 1.0 approach to extensibility,
the markup would be interpreted as RDF/XML, which assigns a role for
the different parts of the XML structure. The pseudo-Atom is making
the statement:

_:entry prism:embargoDate "2005-02-15" .

The embargoDate is unambiguously a property of the entry. In the RSS
1.0 case this is defined in the RDF model.

IMHO Atom would benefit from a similar disambiguation mechanism.