RSS-Data

I just started chewing on Jeremy Allaire's item on RSS-Data. This is from a very constructive comments thread, followed by some very preliminary thoughts...

I'd love to see an example showing how RSS-Data is a Good Thing compared to a similar RSS 2.0 w/namespace example. It just seems like we're losing some precious semantic information when we drop down to datatypes in the document.

• I like the idea, because I like XML-RPC's data definitions, more or less, especially how uncomplicated they are for programmers.
• I don't like the idea for the same reason, it does not result in domain-specific XML tags and document definitions.
• The difference between these two points is that in XML-RPC this "tagged data" document is represented as a struct

As per Greg and Eric... whether you use this approach or an XML namespace approach, you still have the same need for an out-of-band agreement. In either case you will have nested values and name/value pairs that only "mean" something to the people who write the code that makes it useful.

In short, I could get code working with either approach (and will probably have to). There will be thrash, but congratulations for getting a very important ball rolling.