On May 15, 2009, at 11:08 PM, Leif Halvard Silli wrote:
Geoffrey Sneddon Fri May 15 14:27:03 PDT 2009
On 15 May 2009, at 18:25, Shelley Powers wrote:
> One of the very first uses of RDF, in RSS 1.0, for feeds, is
still > in existence, still viable. You don't have to take my
word, check it > out yourselves:
>
> http://purl.org/rss/1.0/
Who actually treats RSS 1.0 as RDF? Every major feed reader just
uses a generic XML parser for it (quite frequently a non-namespace
aware one) and just totally ignores any RDF-ness of it.
What does it mean to "treat as RDF"? An "RSS 1.0" feed is
essentially a stream of "items" that has been lifted from the
page(s) and placed in an RDF/XML feed. When I read e.g. http://www.w3.org/2000/08/w3c-synd/home.rss
in Safari, I can sort the news items according to date, source,
title. Which means - I think - that Safari sees the feed as "machine
readable". It is certainly possible to do more - I guess, and
Safari does the same to non-RDF feeds, but still. And search engines
should have the same opportunities w.r.t. creating indexes based on
"RSS 1.0" as on RDFa. (Though here perhaps comes in between the fact
that search engines prefers to help us locate HTML pages rather than
feeds.)
Safari's underlying feed parsing code completely ignores the RDF
nature of RSS 1.0. It parses it the same way as an RSS 2.0 or Atom
feed, which is to say parsing as XML (possibly broken XML in the case
of RSS variants) and then examining the parsed XML in a completely ad-
hoc fashion.
Regards,
Maciej
