On 16 May 2009, at 07:08, 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.)

I mean using an RDF processor, and treating it as an RDF graph. Everything just creates from an XML stream (or object model) a bunch of items with a certain title, date, and description, and acts on that (and parses it out in a format specific manner, so it creates the same sort of item for, e.g., Atom) — it doesn't actually use an RDF graph for it. If you can find any widely used software that actually treats it as an RDF graph I'd be interested to know.


--
Geoffrey Sneddon
<http://gsnedders.com/>
<http://simplepie.org/>

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