xhtml-syndication
XHTML Syndication History
The idea of using XHTML syndication is by no means new.
When the idea first started coming up on the microformats-discuss list, it sounded like a new, novel idea. It's not. Of course, I (Ryan King wasn't a citizen of Blogistan when it had been discussed before, so I decided to do some research. Here's a brief history of the idea:
Mark Pilgrim accurately asserts that "Every few months, somebody floats the idea of doing away with RSS and replacing it with HTML or XHTML, 'because semantic markup is all we need'."
Apparently he was right, because the topic keeps coming up.
Mark also says:
I’ve talked about application posture before; it seems to me that this latest movement adopts the wrong posture. The entire success of RSS is predicated on the principle that you can keep doing whatever messed up stuff you’ve always done on your web pages… oh, and do this other thing too. Look, it’s simple, you can code it up in an hour with a few print statements and an escape function. By contrast, this latest XHTML-as-syndication movement seems to be based on the principle that syndication is so incredibly important that you must immediately stop whatever you’re doing with your web pages, upgrade to XHTML, validate your markup, restructure your home page to include all and only the content you’re willing to syndicate, and by the way, would you please unlearn that ugly nasty presentational page layout language you’ve been using for years and learn this wonderful happy structured semantic markup language instead?
In response, in seems that people are already *unlearning their crappy presentational markup shit.* Could it be that, given the move towards a separation of presentation and structure, we may now be able to create a syndication format in XHTML (at least for blogs)?
--RyanKing 14:34, 27 Oct 2005 (PDT)
Work in Progress
This document is a work in progress. If you'd like to contribute, feel free to take one of the links from the Queue at the bottom of the page, analyze it, write a short summary of the proposal and record any issues in the "Issues Raised" section.
Reference: [1]
Issues Raised
This section is for documenting issues raised in earlier efforts at using XHTML as a syndication format.
- How do we represent dates in XHTML? (see above) [2]
- Requiring specific structural elements doesn't make sense [3]
Proposed Profiles, etc
Site Summaries in XHTML
Dan Connoly of the W3C has a "Site Summaries in XHTML" to express RDF 1.0 channels in XHTML.
http://www.w3.org/2000/08/w3c-synd/
A boiled down, loose interpretation of the spec:
- the title of the channel is taken from the title of the page
- each