For whatever reason, there has been a split in the RSS community for a while. Ian Davis proposes Unified RSS, in which RSS 1.0 becomes “RSS Metadata”, and RSS 2.0 becomes “RSS Content”.
For this to work there has to be agreement between the two sides. Some
concessions will have to be made in both camps. As a starting point
I’d suggest that the following principles would have to be agreed:
- Both formats have equal claim to the name RSS.
- Make PURL namespace available to both formats for consistency.
- There should be a well specified separation of responsibilities for the two formats. Overlaps should be eliminated.
- Development on both formats should be carried out as a community project.
- Current RSS specifications should be deprecated in favour of the two new formats.
I’ve never really understood the holy war between the extremists in the two camps. I’ve also never understood the requirement in RSS 1.0 for the <items><rdf:Seq/></items> element. It’s always seemed redundant to me. I always thought that this table-of-contents element should have been optional.
