intertwingly

Yaron Goland: The Emperor standards quietly completely hidden in his black robes while Darth Sudsy, covered in his black carapace, leads in Luke Restafarian in a battle torn uniform, long dreadlocks dragging and heavy fatigue evident in his face and stance. Guards stand by the door at stiff attention.

The hero in this dystopian tale is the spec (especially §3.2.1, §3.3, §4.1.1.1); and it’s trusty side kick, the Feed Validator.  Note the messages the latter produces on this feed, and think about how much more useful the feed would be to RSS Bandit if these warnings were heeded.

It is true that if you start with a custom vocabulary that nobody understands, and add voids to it, what you end up with is darkness that benefits no one.

But if you add meaningful ids, titles, summaries, and dates; what you have can be minimally consumed by existing consumers AND by imperial forces alike.  If you add a little more, you can even get bi-directional, asynchronous synchronization, if you are into that kind of thing.

I will sadly report, however, that the battle to recommend that textual summaries be present when the content isn’t a text construct left a small scar in the spec that can be exploited.  In the face of arguments made by some to allow the omission of all content and summary elements, a compromise of sorts was reached that fell short of recommending textual summaries be present in entries with XML content.  I mention this as an area that dark forces can exploit and an area where vigilance amongst Jedi everywhere is required.