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Dare Obasanjo on RSS-Data:

I had originally planned to ignore the proposal along with the ensuing interest in the format that sprang up in a few weblogs but after seeing an article about RSS-Data in EWeek which attempts to legitimize what is basically a bad idea I decided to go ahead and post a critique of the proposal.

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The bottom line is that it is hard to see how Jeremy Allaire's proposal is any better than the status quo and in many ways it is worse.

Dare and I don't always agree, but in this case I couldn't have said it any better. The RSS-Data proposal takes the god-awful (IMHO) XML-RPC serialization format, and pushes it into RSS feeds. And at the end of the day, you're no better off than you are with RSS extensions, except that it's harder to read, and more difficult to parse.

Les Orchard has also posted (1, 2, 3, 4) about RSS-Data, with some examples.

I don't get it...if the goal is to get aggregators to understand arbitrary extensions, this doesn't help. Not at all. The client still needs to know what the information is...changing the serialization format used isn't relevant to solving that problem. We've already seen lots of namespaced RSS extensions, with more coming. This is the right way to extend a XML document - create a namespace, and put your new elements into it. It's not rocket science.