[whatwg] Link rot is not dangerous

[Maciej Stachowiak]

On May 15, 2009, at 11:08 PM, Leif Halvard Silli wrote:

> 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.)

Safari's underlying feed parsing code completely ignores the RDF  
nature of RSS 1.0. It parses it the same way as an RSS 2.0 or Atom  
feed, which is to say parsing as XML (possibly broken XML in the case  
of RSS variants) and then examining the parsed XML in a completely ad- 
hoc fashion.

Regards,
Maciej