From: Austin Ziegler <austin@...>
Date: 2003-03-20T01:37:39+09:00
Subject: Re: semi-[ANN] Ruby::RSS 0.95

On Wed, 19 Mar 2003 20:15:13 +0900, Kouhei Sutou wrote:
> I wrote similar library, and added entry to
> RAA(http://raa.ruby-lang.org/search.rhtml?search=rss) last night.

I found out about this last night. It seem that there are a small
variety of RSS libraries floating out there, including some mostly
private ones that I've been told about on IRC.

Note that my library is aimed at both parsing and generating. It can
parse 0.9x/2.0 easily (although it uses REXML's DOM-style parser for
the moment), but it can also generate 0.91, 0.92, and 2.0. I can
take a 2.0 feed and turn it into a 0.91 feed (or vice-versa):

  c = RSS::from_xml(rss_2_feed)
  c.to_xml(RSS::RSS_091)

The goal is to make it so that 1.0 feeds can be handled in this way
as well:

  c = RSS::from_xml(rss_2_feed)
  c.to_xml(RSS::RSS_100)

  c = RSS::from_xml(rss_1_feed)
  c.to_xml(RSS::RSS_200)

Validation in my library has been temporarily removed as I have
changed the way that I think about RSS Channel objects (from
versioned to versionless); the version is an aspect of the input or
output, not of the RSS Channel object itself. (Note that there is a
#version attribute on the Channel, but it is nil unless you've read
the channel ::from_xml; it is also not settable.) Validation will
return, but will be based in part on the Python validator at
feeds.archive.org by Mark Pilgrim and Sam Ruby.

A lot of my recent work has been specifically in making such
conversions not only possible, but just that easy. My library is
also mostly API-compatible with Chad Fowler's RSS library (0.91 on
the RAA). As such, I've also included a DRb example, and expect to
also offer alternative generation schemes through templating (at
least ERb).

I have downloaded your version to learn from it -- I haven't wanted
to tackle the 1.0 spec because it's so ugly; perhaps we can merge
some of the efforts so that there's a single complete RSS library
for users to build on (I'm sure all of the blog-tool-writers will
want something that can output any version of RSS; there's been talk
of Ruby-RSS aggregation as well).

-austin
-- Austin Ziegler, austin@halostatue.ca on 2003.03.19 at 11:19:12