Re: Media Enclosures and RSS 1.0 / RSS 1.1

On 7/21/05, Karl Dubost <karl@w3.org> wrote:
> 
> Someone asked a question on his Weblog.
> 
> [[[
> Why can't enclosures for RSS 1.0 and 1.1 look similar to
> 
> <fict:enclosure
>      rdf:resource="http://example.org/american-motor-over-smolded-
> field.mp3"
>      dc:format="audio/mpeg"
>      fict:length="14784921" />?

mod_enclosure [1] starts with:

<enc:enclosure rdf:resource="http://foo.bar/baz.mp3"
enc:type="audio/mpeg" enc:length="65535"/>

Supporting it in apps isn't a problem either. But very few of the
developers in the field see any reason for doing anything other than
the de facto standard (*cough*) :

<enclosure url="http://foo.bar/baz.mp3" length="65535" type="audio/mpeg" />

So I think we're probably stuck with it for another year or two yet. 

But it's not all bad news, I think 'simple' RSS in the wild has been
getting progressively cleaner. I imagine the desire for people to get
their material on iTunes and to aggregate Yahoo! Media RSS will act as
fairly powerful validation processes for RSS+Media XML. If the XML is
half-decent, RDF is but a stylesheet away.

Atom (now effectively finished at 1.0 [2]) may not be RDF/XML, but it
does have significantly better coverage of the foundation layers of
the cake (URIs, XML, xmlns, Unicode, trifle sponge...) and a
semi-constrained extension mechanism that may help with RDF mapping.
What will happen with Atom + media is anyone's guess, but now would be
the time to influence things.

Cheers,
Danny.

[1] http://www.xs4all.nl/~foz/mod_enclosure.html
[2] http://ietf.levkowetz.com/drafts/atompub/format/

-- 

http://dannyayers.com

Received on Thursday, 21 July 2005 22:41:59 UTC