Namespaces annoyances in RSS
In an earlier note I listed
four namespaces used in
RSS and RSS for the same element names.
One of these has now been unmade: the RSS specification never explicitly
mentioned the namespace, but the sample file included an
xmlns attribute. While I was away in Canada,
this was
removed to ensure backward compatibility with
RSS 0.91. This makes sense (there exist examples of
applications that genuinely are broken by this), but is kind of icky.
There is still the old RSS 0.9 format—which did use its own namespace—but given that even RSS 1.0 did not preserve that, I think we can assume it is dead too. I assume that the programs that were broken by the fleeting addition of the RSS-2.0 namespace are also incapable of parsing RSS-1.0 data?
I just tried printing a copy of the RSS 2.0 spec., but because he chose to use a fixed-width table for the text, it is clipped all down the right-hand side of the page, making it useless. Goddammit!
Update (2002-10-14): I have removed the namespace declaration from my experimental RSS feed.