0xDECAFBAD: And your conclusion would likely be correct.  I disagree.  To help illustrate the point, I've made a change to the namespace in my rss2 feed.  Is it valid according to the specification?  I don't know.  If so, it would be very more difficult to write an XSLT based aggregator which could handle the potentially infinite number of possible namespaces apparently permitted by the spec.

RSS 1.0 has been free of such discontinuities.  Title has always been required.  The namespace has always been specified.  As you said, This is an issue of versioning, understanding the technology's implications, and reverse-compatibility

Similar to the statement that I said about the change in title, adding namespaces to the RSS 2.0 spec was a was a bold step that may break a number of assumptions that tools were making, but mades possible a large number of innovations and creativity.

  2:28:27 PM   Comment 

When I say "Prince" do you think of a pop idol of the 80's that flirted for a while with an unpronouncable symbol?  Now when I say "Prince Charles" do you think of a person with somewhat flappy ears?

By the logic that Dave is applying to RSS, Dave would have you believe that they are the same individual.  He claims that scripting news's rss feed (in which all the elements are in the http://backend.userland.com/rss2 namespace is as valid RSS as one in which the elements are in no namespace.

And then he talks about parsers which properly handle namespaces as if they are the ones that are broken.

I thererefore must change my opinon.  Where I previously thought that RSS 2.0 suffered from a simple omission, now I must consider RSS 2.0 fundamentally busted.

Sorry, Dave.

Update: now that there is recognition that the spec is imperfect in regards to namespaces, my opinion goes back to this being a simple omission.

  12:22:52 PM   Comment