What problems are RSS libraries trying to solve?
I spent the day reading Python books, and now I'm starting to look at the many libraries that are available for reading and writing RSS in Python. There are certainly more libraries available than in Ruby, and that makes Python seem like a place I should spend some time, but all of the libraries seem to have the same perspective, which is to treat RSS as a specific variety of XML. What if I don't care about DOM and SAX and stepping through a tree of XML? I keep thinking about what happened when dBASE first appeared in 1981. At that time the standard way to do database programming was to use CBasic or Microsoft Basic to construct a record in memory using string variables. It was up to the programmer to do what was called record blocking, where the strings were padded out to fixed lengths and then written out to a text file. If you wanted an index as well, you had to find a separate library and manage insertion and management of nodes in a B-tree. Then dBASE came along, and all you had to do was say APPEND or EDIT in a program. dBASE wasn't about database details, it was about application building. If you wanted an index, you just said "INDEX ON <field>," and the index was created and automatically maintained. Instead of being a database programmer, you could be an inventory programmer, or a doctor's office programmer. In fact, doctors could become programmers and create their own applications. That is what I want with RSS and OPML. I don't care whether a feed is RSS or RDF, or what the specific XML tags are. I want to be able to say "Give me the posts from this list of feeds that are less than 1 week old. Now combine them all into a new feed." That should be 3 or 4 lines of code. There has to be a reason that RSS programming is still about creating generic aggregators instead of RSS applications. It is a combination of tools and coders who are thinking about RSS as streams of XML data, and not application specific data that should be represented as vertical applications that have nothing to do with reading blogs.
