RSS 2.0 questions

[Roedy Green]

I spent the day adding RSS 2.0 feeds to my HTML Static macros package.
You embed magic comments in the HTML, the macro processor finds, sorts
and groups them by feed category/day, and exports them as plaintext
XML and expands them inline as HTML.

It was pretty straight forward. Having plenty of examples greatly
helped.

I have a few puzzles:

1. Why no DTD?

2. there appears to be no field for your home page, but Opera RSS seem
to want to display it.

3. There is no embedded URL in the XML to tell where the ordinal is
posted. Was that an oversight or deliberate for some reason?

4. I keep seeing references to "aggregators". Now I have my feed, am I
supposed to register it somewhere? Are there any "must" sites? Is it
like PADs where you just need to seed a few places, and others pick it
up by osmosis?

 

[Tom Anderson]

I have a few puzzles:

1. Why no DTD?

Because RSS was invented by imbeciles, and then developed further by
imbeciles. It was a replay of early HTML, basically.

There's a successor to RSS called Atom, which is much cleaner, and pretty
widely supported. You could consider using that instead, or as well.

3. There is no embedded URL in the XML to tell where the ordinal is
posted. Was that an oversight or deliberate for some reason?

I'm not sure what you mean by 'ordinal'.

If you mean a URL to the feed itself, i'm not aware of any reason for
deliberate omission. I assume the inventors just didn't think it was
necessary, or didn't think of it. There is a link to the website that the
feed describes, though, and there's a mechanism for discovering feed
addresses from website addresses using an HTML link element.

Atom has the ability for a feed to indicate its own URL.

4. I keep seeing references to "aggregators". Now I have my feed, am I
supposed to register it somewhere? Are there any "must" sites? Is it
like PADs where you just need to seed a few places, and others pick it
up by osmosis?

I suspect the most common way of using an RSS feed is to notice that a
website you're visiting has one (courtesy of Firefox's little orange icon
or equivalent) and subscribe to it. It doesn't need to be registered,
indexed, etc. Although that certainly woudn't hurt.

tom

 

[Roedy Green]

I'm not sure what you mean by 'ordinal'

spell-checker typo. I meant original.

 

[Roedy Green]

Because RSS was invented by imbeciles, and then developed further by
imbeciles. It was a replay of early HTML, basically.

There's a successor to RSS called Atom, which is much cleaner, and pretty
widely supported. You could consider using that instead, or as well.

After some sleep, I'll look into Atom. It should be pretty easy to
generate it as well now I have the framework. I was under the delusion
that Atom was the granddaddy.

 

[Roedy Green]

http://feedvalidator.org/

I ran my script through and I was surprised how many picky things it
found. One of the things it showed me was how to put in a self
reference to where the feed itself lives. It turns out you graft in a
couple of Atom commands to the RSS. This is apparently kosher.

That is a very well done validator.
Thank you for pointing it out.

 

[Roedy Green]

3. There is no embedded URL in the XML to tell where the ordinal is
posted. Was that an oversight or deliberate for some reason?

here is the strange kludge to do it:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="ISO-8859-1"?>
<Ross version="2.0" xmlns:atom="http://www.w3.org/2005/Atom">
<channel>
<title>Canadian Mind Products | Java Glossary</title>
<link>http://mindprod.com/jgloss/jgloss.html</link>
<atom:link href="http://mindprod.com/rss/jgloss.xml" rel="self"
type="application/Ross+ml" />

 

[Tom Anderson]

here is the strange kludge to do it:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="ISO-8859-1"?>
<Ross version="2.0" xmlns:atom="http://www.w3.org/2005/Atom">

^^^^

Roedy, i think you need to give your spellchecker a sound beating!

tom

 

[Tom Anderson]

I ran my script through and I was surprised how many picky things it
found. One of the things it showed me was how to put in a self
reference to where the feed itself lives. It turns out you graft in a
couple of Atom commands to the RSS. This is apparently kosher.

Kosher for RSS, which isn't saying a lot.

That is a very well done validator. Thank you for pointing it out.

It's by Sam Ruby, isn't it? He's a pretty sharp guy.

tom