in Technical 244 Words

RSS-Data

What I like about Jeremy Allaire's RSS-Data proposal:

  1. Reduced need to change RSS schema, binding, and parser to support new payloads.
     
  2. Possibility of reusing XML-RPC code and SOAP code.
     
  3. Arguably faster to parse.
     
    In my experience, element-rich XML documents are faster to parse than attribute-rich XML documents.  But this is not important given readily available processing power at the consuming end.

What I dislike:

  1. Ugly and harder to read although not as bad as RDF.
     
  2. Increased need to change RSS application to support new payloads.
     
  3. Contextually inconsistent and verbose.

    <name>
      <name>value</name>  <!– implicit style –>
      <name>
        <name>name</name> <!– explicit style –>
        <value>value</value>
      </name>
    </name>     

With RSS-Data, developer's attention will shift from RSS parsers to RSS application frameworks capable of supporting new payload types and routing mechanics via plugins.  Despite irksome cosmetic downsides of RSS-Data, I like that.

Only problem is that one can make the same arguments for RDF which makes me a hypocrite.  No news there, but I find it ironic to see RDF folks attacking RSS-Data.

Update #1 – 2003/10/08 10:21AM PST

Text moved to RSS-Data Clarified because it was too long.