On Thu, 02 Dec 2004 20:30:17 +0000, Andy Dingley <dingbat@c...> wrote:

> 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>
>

Now that what I call a valuable reply:-)
Thank you very much.

-- 
Joris Gillis (http://www.ticalc.org/cgi-bin/acct-view.cgi?userid=38041)
Ceterum censeo XML omnibus esse utendum