Microcontent and RSS-Data
In response to the opposition to RSS-Data, Marc asks, "Where are the Reviews, Resumes, Recipes, Topics and other cool new forms of micro-content?"
Well, I did a bit of Googling this morning, and this is what I found:
- On the subject of reviews, A.M. Kuchling has provided an RDF namespace for embedding book review metadata within XHTML documents.
- For resumes, Uldis Bojars has been working on an RDF schema for resumes and CV.
- To offer up recipes, I found this RDF schema for recipes hosted on donnafales.com.
- As for topics, well, there's already a straight RSS 2.0 namespace extension called Easy News Topics.
- And, finally, for events there is mod_event, and RSS 1.0 module used for presenting calendar event information.
Yes, with the exception of ENT, these are RDF schema or namespaces. But, any one of them could likely be adapted to straight XML and used as an RSS 2.0 namespace, thereby leveraging the work these people have already done in modeling these kinds of content, as well as potentially providing an easy transformation path to RDF for those who care.
What does RSS-Data provide out of the box which makes any of the above obsolete? There's no magic here, other than translating between raw data sctructures. You'll still need to do the same sort of modeling and structure work that the authors of all the above have done. It's always nicer to have someone else do homework for you.
So, if all this new microcontent is so hot, why hasn't anything like the above been put into use? Would adding 5 new tags to an RSS feed really be an insane burden to express calendar events? Granted, some of the other examples above are more complex, but then so are the things they seek to represent.
What's the RSS-Data magic that improves on all the above?
shortname=microcontent_and_rss_data
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