GeoRSS Caution

I think that if you write something cautionary about GeoRSS, like this:

Do be careful, because while these are "standards" they've not been approved by anyone, just put out there by their creators.

and also happen to consult for an industry standards organization that maintains standards alike to GeoRSS, you probably ought to make a disclosure statement of some sort. Even if your blogging has been generally favorable to GeoRSS.

Standardizing on RSS is a no-brainer. There are orders of magnitude more information being shared via RSS than by OGC protocols. It works. It scales. It's extensible. It's not going away. The success of RSS is very much a grassroots story. These folks didn't wait for W3C approval, they mobilized and took the web by storm.

The largest risk for you, the GeoRSS implementor, is that you'll go overboard with multi-part GML 3 geometries that others won't parse. Don't get me wrong, GML 3 is my favorite OGC spec by far, and has been a big influence on the development of PCL's feature model, but the fact remains that there aren't yet any full-featured GML parsers that integrate well with the top web scripting languages. I'm trying to do something about that, for Python, but it's nowhere near ready.

Update: I'm clueless. No disclosure needed.