RSS/XML-Data
October 2, 2003
There's a proposal from Jeremy Allaire to use RSS in combination with XML-RPC to create a new format.
Now, I may be (and probably am) missing a lot of subtle issues here, but my understanding is that the goal is to extend RSS (via namespaces) with a way to transport arbitrary typed data. By this I mean that the XML that is sent along doesn't follow a schema specific to the data being sent, but rather a generic (or meta) schema, very similar to the way RDF is built on top of XML, but doesn't really use it. (So the namespace is something like "generic-xml-data-format" instead of "order" or "bookdescription" or what-have-you).
If this is true, I believe that it's another case of an illusion that seems to be floating around quite a lot - that you can solve the problems of applications communicating with each other by using some sort of generic format, while in reality it only shifts the work one meta level up. So the protocol implementation won't deal with specific types, but instead your application will do it. And this is innovation? I don't think so.
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This page contains a single entry from Stefan Tilkov's Random Stuff posted on October 2, 2003 11:08 PM. The previous post in this blog was A Feature that Sucks. The next post in this blog is Web services standards overview. Many more can be found on the main index page or by looking through the archives.