[wp-hackers] Re: RSS Decisions

[Scott Merrill]

So there's a vocal body of RDF supporters.  I admit fully that I am
ignorant of machine-readable formats, and their many uses.  I further
admit that I only think of these formats in the context of feed reading.

History suggests that WordPress will progress in whichever way that Matt
or Ryan deem best, so perhaps Phil's right when he disparages this
thread as comedy.

Dougal Campbell wrote:
> Scott Merrill wrote:
>>  From what you've put forward, I still don't see a compelling
>> argument to keep RDF.  Sure, some people use it.  You haven't yet
>> proven that _many_ people use it.
> 
> 
> But neither is there evidence to the contrary. The owner of a blog is
> not the primary consumer of RSS data. So asking a WordPress user "do you
> use your RDF feed" is useless. And as Phil Ringnalda pointed out, simply
> dropping support for it in favor of a plugin would remove a large pool
> of blog data from the net. Yes, the data would still be available in
> other forms, but the RDF blog format is used heavily by a rather strong
> subset of technically inclined folks.

So, please educate me: what applications are consuming RDF?  I might
find something terribly important that I hadn't realized was RDF under
the hood, and become a convert.  How large is the population served by
the tools being produced by the subset of technically inclined folks?

 CaptSolo wrote:
> Following your thought then we should make _all_ formats (RSS1, RSS2,
> Atom) be an option that the user will switch on if he/she wishes to do
> so. What will be the result? Probably 10 to 20-fold decrease in the
> number of feeds and data available.

You're making the assumption that a fundamental goal of WordPress is to
provide this machine-readable information to the subset of technically
inclined folks mentioned above.  There's already a rather large row
brewing between the folks who want WordPress to remain _just_ a blog and
those who want WordPress to develop further down the CMS path.

I wonder what portion of the users of WordPress would care about the
subset of technically inclined folks making tools with RDF.  But again,
I'm ignorant of their tools, and eagerly await education.

-- 
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