So, after all the blogging discussion at XCOM 2002, and prodded by the fact that#

Tue, 11 Jun 2002 01:17:45 +0000

So, after all the blogging discussion at XCOM 2002, and prodded by the fact that someone had actually asked for it, I decided it was time to investigate all that RDF/RSS/news feeds/syndication business. Not (yet, anyway) for this diary, but for CLiki's Recent Changes.

• There are four versions: 0.9, 0.91, 0.92, 1.0

• 0.9 is apparently deprecated. This hasn't yet stopped slashdot and a billion other sites from using it, but let's assume we should avoid it for new work.

• 1.0 seems to be less of a web site summary format and more an attempt to take over the world. Its authors share the common delusion that if they can simply agree on the symbols between the angle brackets, they can avoid the hard questions about how to categorize the planet, and their plan does tend to suffer slightly due to these priorities.

• 0.92 is backward compatible with 0.91 (which you'd expect for a 1% change in version number, really). 0.91 was not compatible with 0.9; perhaps the people who were around at the time had their expectations conditioned appropriately by this fine piece of engineering management, which is why they feel so excited by about compatibility now.

• There is no DTD for 0.92, nor can I find one of those new-fangled we're-too-dumb-to-read-dtds xml equivalent things. The nearest thing is a document on the userland site laughably termed a specification, but how can you have a validator if there's nothing to validate against? You can't even write a valid DOCTYPE.

• This is a more pertinent question than you might have thought, as userland have a "validator" on their site. My rdf files pass it.

• But whatever their registration form does also involves some kind of validation(sic), and that doesn't work, failing with the error message

    There was a problem reading or parsing your XML file. Here's the
    error message.
       Can't get the address of "language" because the table doesn't
       have an object with that name.
  

  This is well up to the Oracle standards for reporting the specifics of what went wrong, but it's also inaccurate: if we assume that it means ``a required "language" element is missing from (somewhere)'', it's wrong, because "language" is optional in 0.92.

Can you tell how impressed I am by this? An RDF probably-RSS feed of CLiki is now available from https://ww.telent.net/cliki/recent-changes.rdf anyway. Let me know if you find anything useful to do with it.

More CCLAN mirrors. Now we need some more content, really.