RE: [RSS-DEV] Re: Very Simple RSS 2.0 Proposal [was: Two "beefs" with RSS 1.0]

Dan Brickley wrote:

[...]
> If the RSS-DEV WG were to improve RSS 1.0's account of these issues,
and
> offer guidlines for producers and consumers, I could live without the
> rdf:Seq and without document ordering carrying any meaning. But all
the
> time RSS feeds want to have a meaningful default ordering (which will
> often _not_ be the same as that you'd get from ordering on date of
item),
> I want to be able to get this from the rdf:Seq too. Otherwise we risk
a
> return to RSS 0.9, where it appeared to be RDF, but critical (or in
this
> case, non-critical but very useful) information was only available if
the
> feed is processed as XML rather than RDF.

I would venture an estimation that most of the RSS consumers we
currently have actually DO process RSS feeds as XML documents rather
than RDF, if for no other reason than that XML parsers are a widely
available and known quantity and RDF parsers are not.

But even if we had available RDF processors, the question of syntax
still seems relevant to this RDF newbie. Why is it that an RDF processor
can preserve element order when elements are wrapped in rdf:Seq, but not
when the elements are indicated as being ordered via an external schema
mechanism?

In other words, why can't I put in my document...

  <a>
    <b/>
    <b/>
    <b/>
  </a>

and then say in another schema document:

  the elements //a/b form a sequence, treat them as if they children
  of a were in a rdf:Seq element

(One obvious answer to why we might still want to indicate sequences of
items in an RSS document explicitly rather than rely on their order is
that we might want to have the source of the document indicate more than
one type of ordering. This is another architecture aspect which I'm not
talking about here.)

Ziv Caspi
  cell: +972-53-668-751
    web: http://radio.weblogs.com/0106548/

Received on Tuesday, 10 September 2002 14:48:33 UTC