[georss] Lack of standardisation and forethought in Draft for Encoding Geographic Features in GeoRSS

[Marc]

Hi Andy

>My first post to this list ;-)  
>
Welcome Andy. Glad to have you with us.

>proposes using a space as a separator:
>         <georss:point>45.256 -71.92</georss:point>
>This makes my head hurt!  
>
The space as a separator is more robust and less error prone. In many 
countries the comma is used as the decimal separator and there will be 
many feeds with commas as the decimal separator. Using space as the 
separator, it is possible to write a GeoRSS parser able to deal with 
wrong input.

>Also, I see that the draft says of the IETF encoding:
>         Too complex for our needs (we don't need room numbers ...)
>but suppose someone has an RSS feed for a list of, say, events at a
>conference, including the room number of each...
>
This is a good point and we can still change the draft. The reasons for 
not using room numbers are :

   1. GeoRSS should be as simple as possible for the huge majority of
      feed producers and feed consumers. It should be self speaking and
      easy to use.
   2. Complex and rare use cases can use the gml namespace within
      GeoRSS. It is true GML has no address encoding yet, but am sure
      they are going to have one soon.
   3. If GML is not sufficient for some use cases, GeoRSS could use the
      IETF encoding in the same way it is already using the GML encoding.

Any comments are welcome.

Marc