[wp-hackers] Need more RSS hooks

[Danny Ayers]

Ok, long thread, I may have missed but here's my €0.02 :

I am a big fan of XSLT, but it's not needed for putting a
human-friendly face on feeds. CSS can do it, e.g. see [1].

The feed: URI scheme may be expedient, but it's web-architecturally
pretty awful, and certainly shouldn't be seen as a long-term solution
to feed subscription (at best it's a workaround for RSS 2.0's lack of
a standard mime type). See [2] for some discussion.

On a broader point, although the most common use for feeds is as
bare-bones content deliverers allowing aggregated reading, this is
only one application of syndication. In the CMS case it's possible to
deliver much more information about the site in a
machine-readable/processable form - an example would be the categories
and user lists. Aggregators have the potential to be *way* smarter
than they are today, but it's a chicken & egg situation. A small step
towards bootstrapping improvements would be to make more information
available in the feeds - it's comparatively low cost (considerably
less that presenting the HTML rendering, not least because styling
isn't an issue) for potentially large benefit.

Cheers,
Danny.

[1] http://www.petefreitag.com/rss/
[2] http://annevankesteren.nl/2004/08/finding-feeds

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http://dannyayers.com