my i ramble for a while?

I am posting this message to the php.general newsgroup because I used php to construct the dynamic portion of our site and because I value the opinions of many people who frequently post here. I hope that this will not be viewed as off-topic --if it is, I will take it elsewhere. At affero we are beginning to think in terms of publishing certain data to whomsoever might wish to use it for whatever reason. Here's a first cut attempt to provide such a service: http://pws.affero.net/hof/topPatrons returns an HTML <table> ... </table> structure suitable for use as, say, a server side include. Another kind of data which we might publish is what we refer to as a 'dense reputation' or a 'reputation summary'. For an example of a dense reputation you can point a browser at this URL http://svcs.affero.net/user-history.php?u=Poole the dense reputation appears highlighted after the user id on the top line of the page. One of the things that concerns me lately is how to make data such as these available as widely as possible. I have looked in to RSS for a few days and, while I am somewhat confused, I have begun to come more or less to the conclusion that RSS is employed mainly for syndicated news feeds and probably is not appropriate for publishing tabular data and short strings. Maybe some kind of procedure call mechanism, eh? SOAP and XML-RPC seem to be competing technologies, though. If we support one of them, how many sites will be excluded from accessing the data which we wish to make available? Should we support both? XML seems attractive because it can be styled into so many different kind of presentations, but I just can't tell if this would be appropriate. I was wondering if anyone might be able to share thoughts or opinions or experience related to such issues. -lee --