Chapter 5. Richer Metadata and RDF

Every public action which is not customary, either is wrong, or, if it is right, is a dangerous precedent. It follows that nothing should ever be done for the first time.

Francis M. Cornford

The feeds we've seen so far are very simple. They provide little information beyond what is needed for the instant gratification of displaying the feed in a human-readable form. Of course, this isn't such a bad deal many people only want to display the feeds as they come.

Others, however, are more ambitious in their plans for the RSS feeds they use, and for this they require a far richer set of metadata. In this chapter, we look at metadata and give a basic overview of the Resource Descriptive Framework (RDF). This will prepare us for Chapter 6 and the pleasures of RSS 1.0 the RDF-based RSS standard.