Dare
Obasanjo: I'll definitely add support to Joe's CommentAPI
to RSS Bandit but I doubt I'll be doing the same for Sam's
alternative SOAP version since I can't see any motivation for
supporting both besides buzzword compliance.
At the cost of optionally supporting an SOAP envelope and
responding in kind, I get better and easier integration with tools
and languages like
Radio
and
C#. If two elements and
future
extensibility is too heavyweight for you, then no
problem. That's what optional means.
As to your uncertainty about which version of XHTML is meant by
<xhtml:body>, wouldn't the same concern (and more) apply to
<content:encoded>?
There don't seem to be paragraph tags around the content in Syndirella. At least I assume so since there's no paragraph breaks. Is that just a limitation of using <description> or what? It does make it hard to read, since I couldn't tell where your quote ended and your commentary began.
Neither integration with C# (I dislike the automagic RPC-style bindings for interacting with XML Web Services in v1 of the .NET Framework) nor possible future extensibility strikes me as a reason to support the SOAP version of the Comment API at the current time. When it offers more besides needless bloat I'll probably support it.
As for the difference between content:encoded and xhtml:body, with the latter processors assume they are getting opaque data that they pass on to a rendering component while with the latter the implication is that it can be processed using technologies and APIs that operate on XML infosets. With content:encoded my assumption is that the only software that is expected to process its contents are web browsers or similar rendering engines. With xhtml:body this is not the case. You are basically giving me the ability to run queries or transforms against your content. In this case, the less ambiguity in what the structure of your content will be the better.
tamaracks: welcome to the future. If your reader understands xhtml:body (which means NewsGator and, um, NewsGator), then you get links, paragraphs, and unsemantic emmed quotes in Sam's RSS 2.0 feed, and otherwise you don't. I'm not sure whether to be amused or ashamed by this, but I just said screwt, I'm going back to the RSS 0.91 feed at index.rss, with everything in lovely encoded HTML in description where everything can find and understand it.
Following the discussion (Sam, BlogWorks,...) about how to implement CommentAPI, what (SOAP or XMLRPC) and why, trackback mechanisms, ping back etc. my feeling is that the overall direction will be somewhat like a NNTP network for RSS. All the...