Digest Number 1147

Mitul Patel

2005-11-02 14:28:56 UTC

Hi
I am new to RSS I was just wondering how cud we parse
RSS of some site in our application in .NET(C# ASP).
Is their any API for that ?
Thank you

There are 3 messages in this issue.
1. Re: RSS as a pseudo Web Service
From: if
2. Re: RSS as a pseudo Web Service
From: "Bill Kearney"
3. Re: RSS as a pseudo Web Service
From: if

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Message: 1
Date: Tue, 01 Nov 2005 22:49:09 +0000
Subject: Re: RSS as a pseudo Web Service
Although I take the point which about RSS not being
ideal for data
interchange. There are some good reasons to use RSS
over other methods.
1. Its pretty easy to parse and there are many tools
to help
2. You can serve 2 or more audiences, so our RSS
feed is quite heavy and
contains information which people can read using a
RSS reader or parse
and use in there own applications.
3. Its very common, so many clients now want RSS
over anything else (at
least thats true in the news market)
4. Enclosures allow for a simple and automated way
to collect extra
content, yes you could run a cron job. But now with
a podcatching
client, extra content can be pulled down by less
technical people, in my
mind this is a good thing.
As mentioned we (BBC World Service) do use RSS 1.0
to deliver news to
RSS readers, Aggregators and Developers throughout
the world.

As to processing RDF via XSLT you're in for a

whole other set of

adventures...

Can I just ask you to explain this point?
Thanks,
Ian Forrester - Cubicgarden.com

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Message: 2
Date: Tue, 1 Nov 2005 19:23:33 -0500
Subject: Re: RSS as a pseudo Web Service

1. Its pretty easy to parse and there are many

tools to help
If you're looping through data then it's just data,
that it's structured as
items inside an rss element really doesn't make all
that much difference.
I'd daresay that it's probably going to be MORE work
to cram something into
RSS than to just present it in a relatively direct
raw form.

2. You can serve 2 or more audiences, so our RSS

feed is quite heavy and

contains information which people can read using a

RSS reader or parse

and use in there own applications.

Err, so why not provide the RSS audience with it's
lighter-weight, properly
formatted data, and leave the interchange stuff
separate? If anything,
things like an rdfs:seeAlso URI would be a way to
indicate to a "specially
aware" client that additional data is available.
That way you're not
pushing out needlessly bulky data to clients that
have no use for it.

3. Its very common, so many clients now want RSS

over anything else (at

least thats true in the news market)

As in "when all you have is a hammer, everything
looks like a nail"? Not a
very good excuse, frankly.

4. Enclosures allow for a simple and automated way

to collect extra

content, yes you could run a cron job. But now

with a podcatching

client, extra content can be pulled down by less

technical people, in my

mind this is a good thing.

Which makes huge assumptions about how effectively
the clients will or won't
handle the content. Not all tools will be as smart
about ignoring that
content.
But since you're talking about smarter clients on
the retrieval side, ones
that will know how to parse out this 'special data'
then why bother jamming
it into an RSS feed anyway?

As to processing RDF via XSLT you're in for a

whole other set of

adventures...

Can I just ask you to explain this point?

RDF in it's full glory can present significant
challenges to the limited
ways tools like XSLT are fixated on hierarchical
relationships within the
data. STFW for Simon St. Laurent's adventures in
handling FoaF RDF as if it
were XML. For a simple document it's probably no
big deal but for something
that uses rdf:Description constructs it can be a bit
convoluted. Mainly
because XSLT isn't geared to handle RDF's
non-hierarchical capabilities.
-Bill Kearney

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Message: 3
Date: Wed, 02 Nov 2005 04:26:05 +0000
Subject: Re: RSS as a pseudo Web Service
So generally you would disagree with RSS as a web
API? like how Greg
describes it? [1]
Realistically if you look at the average RSS feed
from a blog with full
text content and roughly 10-15 items, you can easily
break the 50k mark.
My current RSS 1.0 feed for my blog [2] is 85.07 kB
Clients will be client, is what I tend to say. I've
seen clients throw
errors on Dublin core metadata, subsets of escaped
HTML in the
description, xml:lang, etc etc. I don't believe this
is a good enough
reason to stop adding additional content to a RSS
feed. In my
experience, people will change clients if one does
not work for them,
specially if you suggest one.
I fear I may be going off topic, but weight and
clients should not stand
in the way of a person wanting to syndicate more
content than a short
line of descriptive text. Namespaces and RSS
extensions are really
useful and give people the chance to build upon well
thought out
schema's, instead of reinventing the wheel serving
it over REST. Its
reassuring to know that in every service online,
there will be a RSS
feed which has a certain base level of content and
structure. I believe
this is also why RDF is preferred over plain XML in
some circles.
In regards to RDF parsing, I have noticed odd things
with RDF parsing
with XSL but nothing major. But the most complex RDF
I've had to parse
is FOAF. I'm interested to know more about the
problems people face with
RDF parsing in XSL.

=== message truncated ===

Mitul Patel
Talk to me: 816-561-0703
" Ignorance is a prison, Education is the key!
If you don't stand for something, you will fall for anything! "

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