0xDECAFBAD:
And your conclusion would likely be correct. I
disagree. To help illustrate the point, I've made a change to
the namespace in my rss2
feed. Is it valid according to the specification?
I don't know. If so, it would be very more
difficult to write an
XSLT based aggregator which could handle the potentially
infinite number of possible namespaces apparently permitted by the
spec.
RSS 1.0 has been free of such
discontinuities. Title has always been
required. The namespace has always been
specified. As you said, This is an issue of versioning,
understanding the technology's implications, and
reverse-compatibility
Similar to the statement that I said about the change in title, adding
namespaces to the RSS 2.0 spec was a was a bold step that may break
a number of assumptions that tools were making, but mades possible
a large number of
innovations and creativity.
I've started to take a look at pingback.
My first impressions are that it will take more lines of code to
implement and will provide less value than trackback. More on
that when I complete my analysis. Meanwhile, a few reactions
to Hixie's
whitepaper on the subject... I did not mean to imply that
referrers are enough, all I meant to say was to those who did not
appear to want to have two way linkages that they already had
them. All pingbacks and trackbacks attempt to change the
signal to noise ratio. Also trackback metadata can be stored
in HTML comments, partially invalidating the flexibility and
standards compliant issues identified in the whitepaper.
When I say "Prince" do you think of a pop idol of the 80's that
flirted for a while with an unpronouncable symbol? Now when I
say "Prince Charles" do you think of a person with somewhat flappy
ears?
By the logic
that Dave is applying to RSS, Dave would have you believe that they
are the same individual. He claims that scripting news's rss
feed (in which all the elements are in the http://backend.userland.com/rss2
namespace is as valid RSS as one in which the elements are in no
namespace.
And then he talks about parsers which properly handle namespaces
as if they are the ones that are broken.
I thererefore must change my opinon. Where I previously
thought that RSS 2.0 suffered from a simple
omission, now I must consider RSS 2.0 fundamentally busted.
Sorry, Dave.
Update: now that there is
recognition that the spec is imperfect in regards to
namespaces, my opinion goes back to this being a simple
omission.