On Thu, 02 Dec 2004 15:41:32 GMT, "Joris Gillis" <roac@p...>
wrote:

>I don't know anything about RSS, 

I suggest you read the Dive Into Mark article. It explains some of the
background to this and is a good explanation.
http://diveintomark.org/archives/2004/02/04/incompatible-rss

RSS has suffered because of too many standards, and especially because
these standards have generally been poorly specified. In particular
there is no clear guidance on how to embed HTML content within an RSS
item.

A problem with RSS, and all such protocols that try to become an open
publication medium, is that many creators will make content and many
consumers will try to read it. Where the spec isn't exhaustive on how
it _must_ be done, then a situation soon develops of de facto
behaviour for how it _is_ done. Readers become dependent on this, and
you diverge from it at your peril.

> but wouldn'it be easier and more logical to insert the XHTML as elements using namespaces? 

That's an attractive option. However it's not a viable one.
There are several reasons:

Namespacing relies on using XHTML, and you may wish to include HTML
_as_HTML_ not XHTML.  Some consumers may be confused if they receive
XHTML

Namespacing relies on including a balanced fragment (i.e. one that can
be well-formed as as XML fragment). This wasn't a requirement on the
original RSS/HTML enclosure, so this is hard to re-impose in some
cases  (<a name="..." > is one of the more awkward cases to deal
with).

RSS is not an XML protocol. Successive versions of badly-written specs
have clouded this. There are all sorts of references of "ASCII" when
it should really be CDATA.  It's commonplace to include HTML entities,
even when these aren't valid outside the HTML DTD.  Reliable parsing
of RSS from external sources is a mess, and it often relies on
knife-and-fork parsing with non-XML tools.  It's not reliable to
assume good support for standard XML features if you're working with
external feeds, even though you "should" be able to do this.

> And if that wouldn't be possible yet, shouldn't it become possible?

RSS is old. It's post-XML, but pre-XHTML and (arguably)
pre-namespacing. So even if a namespaced approach became widespread,
consumers should (strongly) keep supporting the old way if they still
want to accept content supplied that way.

I use namespaced content for internal RSS feeds within my projects,
where I always use RSS 1.0.  For external work though, I encode plain
HTML. I use balanced fragments, so I close elements like <p>...</p>,
but I don't use the <br /> form for <br>

-- 
Smert' spamionam