In the interests of democratic syndication support, PMS (it's a working title; I have a new release title but I won't bother mentioning it until at least alpha, as some form of motivation or something) should support whatever syndication format the publisher wishes to employ, and it should be easy to add new ones. The logical thing to do is to store data internally in XML, then use XSLT to transform it to the syndication format of choice, be it RSS 1.x, RSS 2.0, Atom or other. Of course, this means also using XSLT to transform the XML to XHTML.

Which raises an interesting question. Apparently, browsers will take an XML file and a link to an XSL transformation and generate HTML (don't know know if it validates, though), which raises the question of whether to bother transforming it server-side. Then again, most search engines suck at searching arbitrary XML, particularly in the absence of a schema, which might be a publisher consideration.

I'm going to spend some "quality time" reading up on XML, XSL and related technologies. The .NET Framework has a robust set of XML processing functionality which I'll continue to play with.

Bed time.