Rationale for RSS 1.0 Articulated
Edd Dumbill has written another excellent article on the proposed RSS 1.0 standard. His most important point is that by increasing compliance with the RDF framework, RSS 1.0 can be more modular than RSS 0.9 and 0.91 are.
CTDATA has been looking for an opportunity to use RSS to indicate the most popular articles on its Web Site, as well as other Web Sites that use our version of the Slash engine. RSS 1.0 apparently will allow us to implement this type of service without making compromises to fit the current rigidly-defined RSS file format.
Syndicating the most popular story list from ctdata.com under the 0.91 standard would have required us to compromise the format of the information in order to make it fit the DTD. The RSS 0.91 DTD or file format contains the following major data elements for each story item:
- title
- link
- description
According to Edd Dumbill, the extension of RSS will address this problem in the following manner:
The use of RDF has
enabled a modular approach so, for instance, financial news providers can
invent a module for sending ticker symbols and include it in their feed. Unlike
with straight XML parsing, however, this new information will simply be
ignored by processors that don't understand it or want to use it. This is a big
advantage over RSS 0.91, which was held in a straitjacket by its DTD.
If this is the case, we will add an extension to RSS that will provide information about the number of page views an article has received. This will allow us to implement a most popular stories headline syndication format.