[wp-hackers] WordPress eXtended RSS DTD

[Geoffrey Sneddon]

On 16 Jul 2008, at 13:13, Viper007Bond wrote:

> Just install WordPress somewhere and then do an export. It should be  
> pretty
> clear pretty quick. :)

What's the point in having an undocumented export format? How is this  
any better than just giving easy access to SQL dumps!? If the idea of  
WXR is to allow easy movement between different blogging packages,  
then it has miserably failed (with only one major package implementing  
it as either an importer or exporter); if the idea of WXR is to have a  
format to move data between WP blogs, then it is very inefficient  
(both in terms of space and in terms of processing speed). If the idea  
is the former, then would it not have been better to go through some  
standardization process instead of just shipping a single normative  
implementation?

Sure, I could setup a WP blog and play around with things like whether  
the title element is HTML or text (this is ambiguous in the RSS  
specification — and WXR is supposedly a subset thereof, and therefore  
will need to allow either), but I have better things to do. I could  
just go and write a generic AtomPub importer in the same time it'd  
take me just to work out what WXR actually is, yet alone implement it.  
Neither RSS nor Atom is particularly nice to implement.

Oh, and if I'm wrong and there is any documentation (and don't say "go  
read the comments in the code": that isn't how you document a file  
format. Take a look at RFC4287 or HTML 5: that's how you define a  
format.), then make it more obvious that is actually exists. I'm not  
going to implement something that I don't know exists.


--
Geoffrey Sneddon
<http://gsnedders.com/>