I like the idea of RSS as a web service. For slower, close-enough-to-real-time news feeds such as the FoxPro feeds I’m hosting at http://www.tedroche.com/RSSFeeds.html, hourly refreshes are good enough. For more of an on-demand site such as Amazon, with thousands of different requests, real-time response via and XML web service transformed to an RSS feed is the right answer.
Now, is there a way to transform the RSS 2.0 feeds that I’m producing to display the other dialects of RSS that a requestor might be interested, such as 0.91, 0.92 or 1.0? Or is there a core commonality that I could produce and then transform (on the fly through XSL, or more programmatically) to generate the desired feed? I don’t want to discourage traffic by not providing information in the format requested. I’ve already run into one aggregator site that was interested in 1.0 only.
Here are some clues a Google search gave me:
radio.weblogs.com/0100887/stories/ 2002/03/18/anXsltTutorial.html
http://www.ecommnet.co.uk/articles/bloggerRDF.asp
Here’s the opposite effect, consuming different RSS feeds via XSLT:
http://www.xml.com/pub/a/2003/01/02/tr.html