Martin Atkins mart at
Wed May 25 07:04:24 PDT 2005

Martin Atkins wrote:
> For RSS I guess we're looking at the Dublin Core elements. dc:author and 
> dc:publisher seem like good places to look.

On closer inspection, it looks like Dublin Core as used in RSS is 
thoroughly useless. None of the elements are defined in a concrete 
enough way to be machine-processable, and all just have hazy definitions 
involving the words "typically" and "usually".

In the wild I see dc:author and friends used to contain people's names, 
email addresses, the software used to generate the feed (!), personal 
website URLs and all sorts. Also, people use zero or more of author, 
creator and publisher all to mean "this stuff is from the given person's 

Certainly none of these fields are suitable to be used to return 
structured information separated into categories like "name", "email 
address", "weblog URL" and so on.

At least rss:title and rss:link seem to be reasonably reliable, so we 
can return weblog name and weblog URL with some degree of confidence. 
Anything more is just wishful thinking though, I think.

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