[wp-hackers] Re: RSS Decisions

[Dougal Campbell]

Owen Winkler wrote:
> Scott Merrill wrote:
>> Danny Ayers wrote:
>>> Again, I
>>> believe Atom alone could provide usable data for the vast majority of
>>> clients. But I see no compelling argument for the arbitrary removal of
>>> RSS 1.0 support.
>>
>>  From what you've put forward, I still don't see a compelling argument 
>> to keep RDF.  Sure, some people use it.  You haven't yet proven that 
>> _many_ people use it.

But neither is there evidence to the contrary. The owner of a blog is 
not the primary consumer of RSS data. So asking a WordPress user "do you 
use your RDF feed" is useless. And as Phil Ringnalda pointed out, simply 
dropping support for it in favor of a plugin would remove a large pool 
of blog data from the net. Yes, the data would still be available in 
other forms, but the RDF blog format is used heavily by a rather strong 
subset of technically inclined folks.

I don't think that dropping RSS 0.92 in favor of RSS 2.0 would cause 
much of a ripple, but the RDF format is sufficiently different from RSS 
2.0 and Atom, and sufficiently useful to justify keeping it, IMHO. The 
RDF data model is very useful. It's easy to get put off by it, because 
the XML serialization of RDF isn't very pretty. But RSS 1.0 provides a 
flexible data framework for which there is already a fairly large 
toolset available to consume and manipulate the data relations.

-- 
Dougal Campbell <dougal at gunters.org>
http://dougal.gunters.org/