How mod_content and mod_dc Influence RSS

I've been experimenting with using XSL transforms to convert 
RSS+content:encoded to HTML (see http://instacontent.com/ for my latest 
results). In addition to making it readable in XSLT-enabled web browsers, I 
also want it to be readable in RSS-agents (I'm testing with aKregator, which 
is powered by KDE's librss). Trying to combine these two requirements has 
lead to some observations which I think will be of interest to the people 
working on RSS standards:


_Encoded content is character-data to XSLT_
In order to get HTML item contents to be rended in the browser, I wrapped them 
in '<content:encoded rdf:parseType="Literal">' which, of course, prevents 
them from being rendered in RSS-agents. I can't find any explanation in the 
archives regarding why <content:encoded> is specified to only hold encoded 
data? (It seems to me that XML is *designed* to mix namespaces so literal 
HTML should actually be preferred.)


_Dublin Core and RSS are Redundant_
I assume that the next version of RSS will depreciate <title> and 
<description> in favour of <dc:title> and <dc:description>. In the meanwhile, 
it would be nice if the Spec recommended that agents treat these as 
interchangable. (I'm going to file a wishlist against librss to this effect, 
as well.)


_RSS Needs Support for Blogs-as-Annotations_
My blog content is on Blogger and I use their <$BlogItemURL$> field to specify 
the external page each blog entry is discussing (I refrain from diary 
postings, although those could reference my FOAF description, I guess). The 
proper way to include this data to an RDF object is to add Annotea 
properties, although I know of no RSS-agents that support them. So instead I 
put it in the <link> element -- after all, @rdf:about already specifies the 
permalink of each <item>. Does it really make sense for a full-text RSS feed 
to use <link> in the prescribed way?


_librss Doesn't Respect Namespaces_
This doesn't have much to do with rss-dev, but it would be nice if the Spec 
noted that RSS will not always be the default namespace and therefore parsers 
need to be namespace-aware.


Please excuse me if some of these issues have been discussed -- I'm not very 
adept at searching through Yahoo's archives.

-----

~ Jared Warren <warren-KqohdIWue1eOxDzaCwUlWg@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Computing Science, Queen's University

References:
XSLT - http://www.w3.org/TR/xslt
FOAF - http://www.foaf-project.org/
Annotea - http://www.w3.org/2001/Annotea/



 
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