From: Francis Hwang <sera@...>
Date: 2004-11-13T10:12:58+09:00
Subject: Re: why does rss/maker not raise errors?

Well, as far as I know every single version of RSS has at least one 
glaring problem: It underspecifies what you're supposed to do if you 
want to send XML tags in your <description>. So you end up doing bloody 
awful things like actually _escaping_ your XML tags, and if you write a 
blog about, say, XML (there are a few, I think), and you're emitting 
escaped XML markers in your RSS code, you actually have to 
_double-escape_ them to get them to show up in most aggregators:

<item>
<description>
Remember, when you're switching to XHTML, the BR tag needs to be 
self-closing: &amp;lt;br /&amp;gt;
</description>
</item>

Aaaaaaaaargggggggggh.

And it doesn't really matter if any one version of RSS is decent, 
because the whole RSS world is a bloody mess. You can try, for 
convenience sake, to release a lib that's only compatible with RSS 1.0, 
but people will find that really super-annoying. And RSS will never 
move forward in any meaningful way, since there are actually _seven_ 
incompatible versions, put out by, I believe, three different 
organizations, and the de-facto owner of RSS wants it to stop more or 
less where it is.

Yesiree, I'm ready for Atom to hit big-time.

F.

On Nov 12, 2004, at 7:57 PM, Aredridel wrote:

>> The RSS space is a bloody awful mess. I'll be glad when everybody 
>> moves
>> to Atom. (My own site included, but hey, I'm lazy.)
>
> Go RSS 1.0 and don't look back!
>
> Rich metadata! Arbitrary info in feeds! It's not just XML!
>
> Ari
>