[microformats-discuss] Evaulating RSS per the microformats principles.

[Andreas Haugstrup]

On Mon, 15 Aug 2005 00:03:33 +0200, Alf Eaton <alf at hubmed.org> wrote:

>> But I can't use that RSS archive for anything. I can't read it (or I'll  
>> have to add it to a subscription list to read it just once). I can't  
>> link to it. For it to be usable as an archive format RSS readers will  
>> have to reinvent every aspect of the webbrowser - with an added RSS  
>> wrapper. That's more tha a little silly.
>
> There's already an HTML version for you to read in your browser [1], but  
> the XML version of a single post (RSS in this case [2]) is still a great  
> place to store metadata - and of course you can link to it (and so can  
> the HTML page, and vice versa). Remember Ken MacLeod's "Is a feed the  
> right place for your data?" [3]: Blosxom can make different versions of  
> each post easily, based on templates, and so can Movable Type - RDF for  
> example [4]. Once the Atom Publishing Protocol is in place, each post  
> will have a version in Atom too.

Why is that RSS (both XHTML and RSS are XML) document a good place to  
store metadata? Why create a new copy if it doesn't give me more than what  
I already can have?

With HTML I can link to individual entries. That's the power of  
permalinks. I can't do that in RSS. Well, I could if I created RSS  
documents with only one item and someone created an "RSS browser". But  
then I'd have to reinvent the whole web using a different flavour of XML  
than the one that has ten years of developement behind it.

The way I see it I have two options. I can either create *another* copy of  
my content, or I can add a little bit of extra metadata in the content I  
already have (using a microformat). I cannot see why someone would even  
consider using RSS over HTML as their archive format.

> [1] http://mike.teczno.com/notes/podcasting.html
> [2] http://mike.teczno.com/notes/podcasting.rss
> [3] http://bitsko.slc.ut.us/blog/feed-data.html
> [4] http://hublog.hubmed.org/archives/001142.html

- Andreas
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