intertwingly

I agree with you that there isn't much "semantic meaning" in a schema in the first place (which is kinda the point of my rant at http://www.kuro5hin.org/story/2003/4/19/211533/168 ) but this doesn't change the fact that something is lost by having to use an xs:string instead of an xs:dateTime.

Specifically technologies that utilize the PSVI to provide typed access to validated XML including technologies like XQuery and object<->XML data binding technologies would not treat the type as a date but instead would treat it as a string which makes processing such dates a lot more tedious.

Dare, would it be fair to say that you would prefer something like dcterms:issued over pubDate and dcterms:lastmodified over lastBuildDate?

What I would most like to see happen here is that a bunch of people who produce or consume RSS feeds express their preferences on subjects like this, and that this be collected into a set of best practices, and that the validator be updated to provide guidance in areas such as these.

Do you have any other preferences?

Sam,
Not really. I'm not currently using a schema to convert RSS feeds into objects or to get typed access to specific values so it doesn't matter that some date format is RFC 822 instead of ISO 8601 since the code I use to process them is indifferent to such issues.

I personally prefer pubDate because that's what my code currently supports and that's what's in most of the feeds that I've seen. Thus less work for me. ;)

PS: Exactly what am I supposed to do with the lastBuildDate info?

I'm unclear as to what the benefit of this proposal is.  pubDate gives aggregators the information required, and it's commonly used.  Why introduce a new element that shows the same information - and moreover, hides it in a namespace.  I don't get it....

In your feed, you have the 'link' element as '/blog'.  Based only on the information available in your RSS feed, how would I deduce the actual url for that?

James: I see we're having the problems. I had chalked it up to the server problems his hoster is having. Perhaps I was mistaken.

James: you never heard of relative urls?

Now that the DNS changes have had a chance to catch back up, I've gone back to full urls.

Of course I've heard of relative urls.  However, if your link (feed level) is set to

/blog

and items to things like

/blog/1368.html

and the feed url is

http://www.intertwingly.net/blog/index.rss

then by eyeballing it, the relative url is obvious.  In code however, it could easily be guessed as either:

http://www.intertwingly.net/blog/

or http://www.intertwingly.net/

as the base url.  See what I mean about guessing?

James: when relative URLs start with a slash, they need to be interpreted as replacing everything after the hostname.

Dare: care to take a position you will stick with?  ;-)

Ok, I guess my question is:  Is there a spec somewhere on how one should interpret relative urls?

James, see the documentation for URIs and XML:

• Relative Uniform Resource Locators
• URI
• XML Base

Sam mentions dc:date; that's what I was thinking, except that 'date' on its own is pretty useless. As Bill points......

Sam,
My position is that I would prefer to keep pubDate because it means I dont have to change my code. :)

Just because I can see some edge cases where using RFC 822 dates would require a relatively trivial amount more work to process than ISO 8601 doesn't mean I think they should be replaced.

Dare, so it probably is a good thing that Jorgen's schema defines a simpleType with a regex, wouldn't you think?

P.S.  My rss2 feed uses dc:date.

Sam,
I wouldn't go as far as calling it a good thing but "good enough" probably accurately describes how I feel about it.

PS: RSS Bandit supports both pubDate and dc:date so I already had you covered.

Sam,
  By my reading of those docs, the way your urls were set up was incorrect.  i.e., the only possible base url was the feed link, which ended in /blog/blah.html

now the relative url looked like

/blog/blah2.html

which, as I read the docs, would result in

/blog/blog/blah2.html

which isn't correct.  Am I reading them wrong?  I don't think so...

James, The RSS feed itself is at http://www.intertwingly.net/blog/index.rss.  Evaluating /blog/1368.html relative to that URL would result in http://www.intertwingly.net/blog/1368.html.

I've made the relative URL cited above a hypertext link.  Try clicking on it to see where your browser takes you.  View source if you'd like to verify.

http://intertwingly.net/blog/ + /test.html = http://intertwingly.net/test.html

If I define this in HTML:

[BASE HREF="http://intertwingly.net/blog/"]

then I do this:

[A HREF="test.html"]

that points to http://intertwingly.net/blog/test.html

However, if I do this on the same page:

[A HREF="/test.html"]

that points to http://intertwingly.net/test.html

Try it yourself.

(SOURCE-"sam ruby") - This is a LiveTopics 1.1.3 beta Test Post. <quote> Jorgen Thelin: Adding in the regexp suggested by Sam for RFC-822 format dates to the RSS 2.0 schema, I have come to the conclusion that I must be missing the point...

(SOURCE-"sam ruby") - This is a LiveTopics 1.1.3 beta Test Post .... [more]

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