RSS is dead dying !!!!!!
So why is RSS a dead dying format! Well my answer is not so simple, RSS is not dead as in usage dead, it's dead as in going nowhere dead. If webloging is going to take the next evolutionary step it's going to have to cut it's ties to RSS. RSS only covers such a small part of how we communicate with our blog that it's bound to take a back seat to a more powerful format at some point.
Don Box:
While spending my evening with RSS, I had two epiphanies:
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The connection between blogging and RSS is deep.
I would say that webloging might even escape the browser some time soon. And I don't think you can express your weblog in a RSS file and HTML is to limited.
Content xml sounds like RDF.
Why is RDF bad! I don't want to start yet another flame war over RDF and usablility. But the beauty of the WWW was HTML. Html is a simple format and it has empowered people. It was also simple enough for the common man to understand and produce. Can the common man produce RDF? If the answer is NO which it is, then HOW IN THE HECK IS RDF EVER GOING TO REACH CRITICAL MASS?
Writing Content xml extensions.
The idea behind RDF is a solid one IMHO :-) namespaces for adding extenstions is good; but their has to be an easier way.
The <extension> element requires two attributes “name” short for namespace and a “version”. The name attibute works like this [extension].[domain] where the prefix is the name of the extension and the rest is the namespace or domain. The version attribute which is the version of the extention is alslo required. This give us the ability to have multiple version and multiple extensions of the same format sort like RSS format with rss.userland.com and rss.purl.org.
It is my hope that extenstions will be easy to understand and have absolutley no rules except for dropnig the root element of an exsisting spec such as <rss> or <opml> or <html> “kind of redundant”. Extnetsion(s) should also be easy to read. I would think dtd(s) or xsd(s) would work with good docs.
Example not in DTD or XSD format. Required -elements and *attributes
-Name [PCDATA] 1
- internetAddress [URL | *prefix] n * prefix="http | https | smtp | ftp | jabber | im | icq"
Which would produce a segment that looks like this:
<extension name="author.radio.weblogs.com/0100044/" version="0.1">
<name>Dave Winer</name>
<internetAddress prefix="smtp">dave@userland.com<;/internetAddress>
<internetAddress prefix=HTTP>http://www.scripting.com/<;/internetAddress>
</extension>
12:13:13 AM 
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