I've been trying hard to get to grips with the substance of Dave
Winers issues on RSS1.0 and namespaces. For ease of reference I have
abbreviated Dave Winers proposal the "expanded core" approach and the
rdf/namespace approach the "rdf approach"

I think that the rdf approach offers the best route forward, however,
it needs to be better explained and more attention needs to be given
to making it easier to use.

The RDF approach needs to answer some valid criticism
=======================================================

There are at least two cogent ones that I can see that people have
made

1) To enable the average developer to cope, a syndication format must
be simple to create and be easily read by a human. The rdf approach
requires too much studying and background knowledge to easily pick up
and is too hard for humans to read and create manually.

2) RSS should also be easy to parse and create using any software
environment which developers care to use. Some software environments
are too weak to handle RDF and the namespace syntax.

To deal with these issues the proposed "expanded core" solution is...

Go for a very simple syntax. Simplicity can only be achieved and
therefore points 1. and 2. resolved by adopting a simple
representation of the metadata in XML. Beyond that the average
developer cannot cope.

If the RDF approach is to be widely accepted and adopted then 1) and
2) require solutions. Not all of them may be technical, but better
software tools support is part of a solution which does not require
the simple syntax required by the "expanded core". This software
tools support should span *all* of the environments which people need
to use... and we shouldn't sneer at people who try to parse this
stuff in Perl, VB or even, shock horror, Macromedia Flash.

Could it be possible to start some kind of co-ordinated open
source/community program to share and distribute the tools which are
available now... and which will be created? Currently there is no
central clearing house for these things as the technology is fairly
new. At the moment there is lots of mailing list activity but few
comprehensive fixed resources. Yes I know that there are quite a few
sites where you can download this or that... whats lacking is an open
umbrella organisation that isn't tainted by some commercial angle.

(The same umbrella organisation/site could also discuss and share the
RSS extensions which are created... )


Control
========

There was also another agenda underlying some of the postings. That
is the issue of control and "who gets to decide" what goes in to the
extended set of attributes in the "expanded core" model.

Who should determine what is and is not "core"? What is so special
about the attributes which, for example, iSyndicate have developed?

One of the enormous benefits of a namespaced version of the RSS
standard is that nobody has to agree to eg: iSyndicates' views. The
community will decide either by using or not using those particular
attributes, expressed as that particular namespace.

In other words, a proper metadata syntax such as RDF and namespaces
preserves and extends the community process by making the core
standard robust to additions which don't work or aren't generally
desired by the community.

Following this approach would actually make it impossible for any one
organisation or individual to decide to split a standard or to
control it... perhaps this is threatening to some!

That being said I have to say that there is a big communication issue
with RDF. Considering that I am an application developer who has
played around with metadata of one sort or another for the last 15
years I have not found RDF and some of the related technologies at
all obvious and easy to grasp. RDF needs a good communicator,
currently the acolytes of this technology are very academic and fail
to sell the technology at all well. As one who also receives the RDF-
interest mailing list you definitely get the impression that "he who
does not understand FOPC should not enter here." That also has to
change if the rdf approach is going to be successful.

IMHO, as ever

Paul Freeman