As we consume more of our information by way of RSS feeds, the inability to store, index, and precisely search those feeds becomes more painful. I’d like to be able to work with my RSS data locally, even while offline, in much more powerful ways.
I’ve long dreamed of using RSS to produce and consume XML content. We’re so close. RSS content is HTML, which is almost XHTML, a gap that HTML Tidy can close. In current practice, the meat of an RSS item appears in the “description” tag, either as an HTML-escaped (aka entity-encoded) string or as a CDATA element. As has been often observed, it’d be really cool to have the option to use XHTML as well. Then I could write blog items in which the “pre” tag, or perhaps a class=”codeFragment” attribute, marks regions for precise search. You or I could aggregate those items into personal XPath-aware databases in order to do those searches locally (perhaps even offline), and public aggregators could offer the same capability over the Web.
Semantic Blog
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