[wp-hackers] A thought about wp-rss2.php

[Luc Saint-Elie]

Hello,

It's just a thought, not a proposition of some code.

wp-rss2.php conception relates to an area when RSS feed were just a
new, high tech way to access the weblog content.

Today things are rather quickly evolving. I'm pretty sure a poll about
the amount of RSS access among weblogs would be surprising

In my case current situation is shown here :
http://blog.saint-elie.com/images/viedusite/rss_access.jpg (as you can
see 50% of my visitors arrive by a RSS way and I doubt to be the only
one)

The day when the first "browser" will be a RSS reader is not that far.

The point of this message is that RSS is a higly delicate area, far
more that HTML/XHTML.
A very light error breaks the readers and so on.

WP is a dam good HTML/XHTML machine, probably the best one... but a
very average RSS machine.

Hacking wp-rss2.php is a very risky task... and for an average wp
install there is a lot to hack (to add creative commons namespace and
tags, now to add iTunes domain name and tags for podcasters and so on)

It would perhaps be a not so bad solution to have a system that output
a static xml file updated each time a new post is isued, in the spirit
of GoogleMaps plug ins.

This way, correcting a badly tagged output would be easier and it
would be possible more easily for users to adapt their system to new
propositions. For example the recent iTunes Podcasting story as shown
two things : the first one is that a huge lot of podcaster use
WordPress (I'm one of those), the second is that these guys have to
struggle a lot to suddenly adapt their install to the new situation.

My two cents

Luc