[wp-hackers] Ditch RDF and RSS 0.92

[Roy Schestowitz]

_____/ On Sun 15 Jan 2006 10:13:21 GMT, [David House] wrote : \_____

> Myself, skippy and ringmaster had a conversation a few days back in
> #wordpress about feeds. We came to the conclusion that RDF and RSS
> 0.92 are basically way too old to still be in the WordPress core, so
> they should be removed. If they are sorely needed by someone a plugin
> can replace them.
>
> http://trac.wordpress.org/ticket/2277 has been sitting in trac for a
> few days. Skippy, TonySt and ringmaster seconded the proposal, does
> anyone have any reasons why this shouldn't take place?

You must ensure that you do not break people's links. When it comes to
feeds, people are lazy and careless. They would possible neglect to update
URL's in their feed reader.

By ditching RSS 0.92, for instance, you might lead recently-upgraded blogs
to be ditched by regular readers. It is then left for the Webmaster to set
up redirections, yet many are unfamiliar with the concept.

Visitors may have subscribed to legacy-type feeds in the past; better honour
what was always there, but no longer maintain it. Treat it like an umbilical
cord instead and whatever happens, happens.

Removing old files altogether would have invalidated many requests, for me
at least. Taking the past 2 weeks' feed requests (wp-rss2.php: 5697;
wp-rss2-fulltext.php: 2312; wp-rss.php 2180; feed/rss2/	1717; feed/atom/
1564), an upgrade of WordPress to the latest version would have broken many
requests, especially these from long-time readers. This makes a bad
impression. Leaving deprecated functions in fact is probably harmless. Just
never link to them.

Roy

PS - Gallery, Nuke, and phpBB still use RSS ~0.92 as far as I can tell.