What is sure is that:

1) per RDF semantic, rdf:about is used as an identifier for the channel.
2) per RSS 0.9x usage, the link element is a URL (or URI) pointing on an
existing page which can be visualized for a human being.

Therefor, I don't think these 2 values should be equals since they are
not referring to the same resources or objects (a channel in one case, a
page in the other one) and this would be confusing if we wanted to
describe the page itself in the same rdf database.

IMHO, a good practice would be to use a URL where the RSS feed can
usually be found as rdf:about.

There are exceptions, though and I don't think we should make a firm
rule about this, but only a "best practice" advise.

These exceptions are, for instance, sites building dynamics RSS feeds
depending on sessions variables for which you can't provide a URI which
will return the same feed (but will still have to assign an identifier
to the channel).

Hope this helps.

Eric

Aaron Swartz wrote:
>
> Ken MacLeod <ken@...> wrote:
>
> > If that's the case, <link> is definitely the URL of the site or
> > channel that this <channel> describes, therefore the rdf:about would
> > be too, and any examples to the contrary are just wrong.
>
> I was just re-reading the spec on this point, and things are very unclear.
> First, the channel element only says "The {resource} URL of the channel
> element's rdf:about attribute *must* be the *same* as that found in each of
> the inchannel elements found in the image, item, and textinput elements." To
> me this implies that it can be any URL.
>
> It is not until you get to the link element that you see "The channel link
> element is superceded by (and identical to) the channel element's rdf:about
> attribute, but is required for backward compatibility with RSS 0.9."
> However, syntax section reads <link>{channel_link}</link> not {resource} as
> would be expected. This is inconsistent with all of the other link elements
> in the spec.
>
> However, every example in the spec, as well as Edd's proposal, use the
> rdf:about to point to the URL of the RSS file, like:
>
> <channel rdf:about="http://www.xml.com/xml/news.rss">
> <channel rdf:about="http://meerkat.oreillynet.com/?_fl=rss1.0">
>
> If nothing else, we need to clear up the inconsistency in the spec.
>
> --
> Aaron Swartz | me@... | http://www.aaronsw.com
>
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> rss-dev-unsubscribe@egroups.com

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Eric van der Vlist Dyomedea http://dyomedea.com
http://xmlfr.org http://4xt.org http://ducotede.com
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