[tocml-list] RDF vs. RSS 1.0

[Curtis Duhn]

I spent this evening re-reading the RDF spec, and then glancing again at
the RSS 1.0 spec.  I'm becoming more and more convinced that RDF is the
right format for TOCML.  Unfortunately, I'm still not sure that RSS 1.0 is
the right format.

RSS 1.0 can be extended using namespaces, and I'm now quite certain that
we could implement TOCML style hierarchies on top of it.  The reason I'm
hesitating to use it is the fact that the existing corpus of RSS documents
is polluted with HTML.  Apparently the RSS spec never said you
can't include markup in your titles/descriptions, and now it's
common practice.  This effectively limits RSS processing to HTML
browsers, which is definitely not what we want for TOCML.

I was hoping that the extensibility of RSS would allow us to route around
the markup problem by using the Dublin Core's dc:Title and dc:Description
element types instead of RSS's native rss:title and rss:description types.
Unfortunately, rss:title is mandatory, so requiring a markup-free dc:Title
would lead to a lots of redundancy.

Perhaps rss:title is less polluted with markup than rss:description.
Titles are certainly much more important than descriptions in TOCML due to
their concise nature.

This page has the results of a survey of tag usage within RSS documents,
but it's over a year and a half old, and pre 1.0.

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/syndication/message/330

I'll have to do some more soul searching.

Curtis Duhn
curtis@duhn.com