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.