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At 9:13 PM -0500 1/20/04, Bob Wyman wrote:
> The issue with our feeds is that we don't put <language> tags
>in them. These tags are defined as optional in RSS V2.0, but there is
>no question that having them improves the utility of a feed
>significantly and some people consider their absence to constitute a
>"broken feed.".
What's the purpose of the language tag? Oh, God, I found it. It's the
natural human language of the feed, isn't it? Bleah. It's really just
a less useful reinvention of the xml:lang attribute, yet another bit
of brain damage by a developer who persists in releasing half-baked
specs based on technologies he doesn't understand. Somehow I thought
he might have learned something in the last few years. I guess I was
wrong.
How would you feel about dropping all language elements and replacing
them with xml:lang attributes? That would certainly better address
your need to tag different items with different languages. (This is
one good reason why the xml:lang attribute should have been used in
the first place instead of a new, redundant language element.)
Furthermore, an unexpected attribute is a lot less likely to trip
people up than an unexpected element. And if anybody challenges you,
you can justify it by reference to the XML spec.
This is a good example of XML's extensibility and non-draconian
nature. There is no reason you shouldn't be able to add useful
information to feeds in this way. Adding a well-formed attribute that
can be ignored by anyone who doesn't care about it is very different
from sending malformed data that causes every XML parser on the
planet to report a fatal error.
--
Elliotte Rusty Harold
elharo@metalab.unc.edu
Effective XML (Addison-Wesley, 2003)
http://www.cafeconleche.org/books/effectivexml
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ISBN%3D0321150406/ref%3Dnosim/cafeaulaitA
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