Re: RSS 2.0 questions
On Fri, 1 Aug 2008, Roedy Green wrote:
I have a few puzzles:
1. Why no DTD?
Because RSS was invented by imbeciles, and then developed further by
imbeciles. It was a replay of early HTML, basically.
There's a successor to RSS called Atom, which is much cleaner, and pretty
widely supported. You could consider using that instead, or as well.
3. There is no embedded URL in the XML to tell where the ordinal is
posted. Was that an oversight or deliberate for some reason?
I'm not sure what you mean by 'ordinal'.
If you mean a URL to the feed itself, i'm not aware of any reason for
deliberate omission. I assume the inventors just didn't think it was
necessary, or didn't think of it. There is a link to the website that the
feed describes, though, and there's a mechanism for discovering feed
addresses from website addresses using an HTML link element.
Atom has the ability for a feed to indicate its own URL.
4. I keep seeing references to "aggregators". Now I have my feed, am I
supposed to register it somewhere? Are there any "must" sites? Is it
like PADs where you just need to seed a few places, and others pick it
up by osmosis?
I suspect the most common way of using an RSS feed is to notice that a
website you're visiting has one (courtesy of Firefox's little orange icon
or equivalent) and subscribe to it. It doesn't need to be registered,
indexed, etc. Although that certainly woudn't hurt.
tom
--
Faith in chaos.