[whatwg] Link rot is not dangerous

[Leif Halvard Silli]

Geoffrey Sneddon Fri May 15 14:27:03 PDT 2009

> On 15 May 2009, at 18:25, Shelley Powers wrote:
>
> > One of the very first uses of RDF, in RSS 1.0, for feeds, is still  
> > in existence, still viable. You don't have to take my word, check it  
> > out yourselves:
> >
> > http://purl.org/rss/1.0/
>
> Who actually treats RSS 1.0 as RDF? Every major feed reader just uses  
> a generic XML parser for it (quite frequently a non-namespace aware  
> one) and just totally ignores any RDF-ness of it.

What does it mean to "treat as RDF"? An "RSS 1.0" feed is essentially a 
stream of "items" that has been lifted from the page(s) and placed in an 
RDF/XML feed. When I read e.g. 
http://www.w3.org/2000/08/w3c-synd/home.rss in Safari, I can sort the 
news items according to date, source, title. Which means - I think - 
that Safari sees the feed as "machine readable".  It is certainly 
possible to do more - I guess, and Safari does the same to non-RDF 
feeds, but still. And search engines should have the same opportunities 
w.r.t. creating indexes based on "RSS 1.0" as on RDFa. (Though here 
perhaps comes in between the fact that search engines prefers to help us 
locate HTML pages rather than feeds.)
-- 
leif halvard silli