[georss] Transport of Toponyms with GeoRSS

[Marc]

Hi Andrew,

I don't really care about addresses, I care about higher level granularity.

The xAL specification is an unwieldy 90 pages paper and I doubt many 
feed publishers and feed processors would like to read it.

On page 13, section 6.3 the xAL specification says:
"Important: Use only elements and attributes that make sense to you. 
Ignore the rest that are needless for you."

Does it mean a feed publisher is supposed to read through all 90 pages 
to figure out which four or five elements he really needs? Wouldn't this 
result in a gigantic tag-soup? If you look at your example you will see, 
it is not well formated xml. Even for you as a highly competent senior 
professional with a lot of experience in this field, it is not so easy 
to come up with a correct xAL example.

What I am looking for is a simple one page document sufficient for 98% 
of all feeds. xAL is addressing the needs of nearly 100%, which makes it 
incredibly complex.

I don't mind using xAL. So lets look at your example to figure out which 
four our five Elements we want to use and put on a single page.

>Just as an example:
><georss:point>45.256 -71.92</georss:point>
>  
>
xAL also supports lat/lng. Why use the georss syntax? What if you have 
more than one 'object' (a number of US states for example).

><xnl:AddressDetails>
> <xnl:Country>
>  <xnl:CountryName>United States</CountryName>
>  
>
I would prefer the CountryNameCode Element with the ISO country code. It 
is hard to parse country names as it may be in an exotic language. 
Parsing the iso country code is much easier.

>  <xnl:Locality Type="City">
>   <xnl:LocalityName>Seattle</LocalityName>
>    <xnl:Thoroughfare>
>     <xnl:ThoroughfareName>MainStreet</ThoroughfareName>
>     <xnl:ThoroughfareNumber>16</ThoroughfareNumber>
>    </xnl:Thoroughfare>
>   </xnl:DependentLocality>
>  </xnl:Locality>
> </xnl:Country>
></xnl:AddressDetails>
>

Cheers
Marc