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Extending RSS and MicroFormats

Whenever I read about someone proposing to add a dozen or more new elements to RSS I ask myself; why not use or propose a MicroFormat instead? It requires less tooling, fragile aggregators won’t choke on it, developers can innovate quicker without waiting for extensive RSS spec. changes, and humans get the benefit straight away without having to wait for systems that may or may not take advantage of the new data.

I’ve always seen RSS as a list mechanism with each item having a payload. RSS shouldn’t be entangled in what it is carrying. That payload is not defined by RSS and you don’t need approval from the RSS board to put a MicroFormat into your RSS item.

Finally, using a MicroFormat makes it very simple to inject the same data and structure into other formats e.g. HTML documents.

This entry was posted on Friday, November 23rd, 2007 at 10:14 am and is filed under Post. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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    I think hResume v HR-XML Resume XML best shows why new XML grammars are better than microformats. In order to build a hResume fragment, you have to understand how microformats work. With HR-XML, you just import the XSD into an XML editor and you can build it without ever seeing an angled bracket. Further, look at the depth of detail in HR-XML vs hResume. Many resume constructs can't even be expressed in hResume.
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    I'm not sure powerful XML tools is a strong argument for XML grammars, especially in this case which isn't a consumer production play. I've used a few XML tools and they are not for the layman. The market still seems to center around purpose built applications which can then emit structured data.

    And for the kinds of companies wanting to use product meta-data in RSS the source would be a database and server-side application. Amazon and co. wouldn't change to XML tools just to get extra elements in an RSS feed and they wouldn't do it to get MicroFormats either. But the RSS producer should be easily configurable to insert the MicroFormat (and even extra RSS elements) from the product database.

    The benefit of the MicroFormat is to the end-user who doesn't need updated tools to gain the benefit of the extra data. In Google Reader it would just be HTML and to a machine it would be easily parsable data.

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