[wp-hackers] Re: RSS Decisions

[Danny Ayers]

On 1/18/06, Chris Lott <chris.lott at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 1/17/06, Phil Ringnalda <philringnalda at gmail.com> wrote:
> > the "rip out RSS 1.0
> > support, because someone writing a SemWeb consumer can just publish his
> > own feed with a plugin, and he won't care whether or not he can get
> > other people's feeds as RDF" bug will be wontfixed,
>
> There are literally dozens, probably hundreds of formats that some
> group of people would like to have available for purposes of data
> mining and app construction and who knows what. Should they all be
> enabled out of the box or should it be up to a site owner to make a
> choice about what data they are publishing?

There is a slight difference between adding "dozens, probably hundreds
of formats" and to removing one that is currently live.

Essentially you are saying
> here, if I read you correctly, that removing RDF is a problem because
> a lot of people don't realize that they are even publishing such a
> feed and so wouldn't do so if it were optional.

It hadn't clicked with me until Phil mentioned it, but that sounds
about right. It isn't the publishers that are (potentially) impacted
in the first instance, but the consumers.

> What about leaving it an option but having RDF and a few well-chosen
> other plugins as part of the Wordpress Core using a good library so
> that maintenance is essentially nil?

I've yet to dig into the source very far, but if the support for
publishing formats can be modularised as plugins it sounds like it
would be beneficial all around (there's probably some nice
functionality that could be added down that path too). But I still
suspect it would be unwise to switch of any of the big 3 formats at
this point in time.

Out of curiosity, a little side question - can anyone give
estimate/guess of the proportion of WordPress install environments
which will (already) support XSLT?

Cheers,
Danny.

--

http://dannyayers.com