Yahoo has a new Video Search Engine that wants to index info about videos on the web, and wants to encourage web video publishers to put said info in RSS feeds using Yahoo's new Media RSS Module for RSS 2.0 (via Danny Ayers and Marc Canter). Neat and notable.

RSS Media has a couple things that I think are classic examples of how easy it is to be inconsistent with XML. The following quotes are from the spec.

<media:people>

Lists the notable individuals/businesses and their contribution to the creation of the media object.

<media:people role="producer">person one's name|person two's name</media:people>

I don't think there is anything wrong with this element in some practical sense, but aren't there way more official XML ways of making lists? How about:

<media:person role="producer">person one's name</media:person>
<media:person role="producer">person two's name</media:person>

One could also add fields for first name and last name, or use a Dublin Core or FOAF type, etc. And, one could create separate types for each role. But, the main point is that this is a classic problem with XML: there is a conflict of priorities between delimiting fields (using a | to separate a list of people, vs using tags), defining distinct "columns" of data (e.g., people vs person, person vs role), and relating those columns to other models (e.g., namespaces).

One way of dealing with this conflict of priorities is trying to make the most of one or more of the possible structures of XML. The other is to just blob it:

<media:text>

Allows the inclusion of a text transcript, closed captioning, or lyrics of the media content.

It's that "or" that'll get ya! Though, again, practically, it'll work if people figure out how to make it work, so why not?

Finally, one personal bugaboo—a perfect example of hype-induced misuse of the word "taxonomy":

<media:category>

Allows a taxonomy to be set that gives an indication of the type of media content, and its particular contents.

Um, why isn't it called media:taxonomy? Because, it's a category, as in "Allows a category to be set..." Advice from your friendly neighborhood Dr. IA / Mr. Metadata / Conan the Librarian:new applications of the word "taxonomy" should be considered harmful.