Version Numbers
Posted by Daniel Thu, 23 Feb 2006 18:22:43 GMT
Sam Ruby: Rogers makes the case that all podcasters relying on multiple enclosures will be publishing RSS feeds that don’t work for what is potentially their largest audience, and Dave pleads for Rogers to “decide whether you’re working on a profile or a new format”. To this, I say, What Dave Said, though I will voice my preference on the two options that Dave puts on the table. [And the latest dustup continues, but it seems to be calming down. I fail to understand the dilemma. I think Atom is Roadmap Acceptable. Maybe the RSS board is in the wrong namespace? If they think there are problems with RSS 2.0 (the spec, format, whatever) why don’t they see if Atom fixes those problems, and if so simply promote Atom? What is the point of minor-modding the spec?]
I’m not sure what other people’s points are, but my two points are:
When I publish an item with a less-than in the title, or (much less likely) with a relative URL or multiple enclosures, or when someone publishes something that my reader doesn’t properly interpret, I don’t want a three month long argument with another developer over whether this blog post means that the spec says this, or that mailing list comment says the spec meant to say that. I don’t mean that hypothetically, I mean that literally: three months of arguing over how a single character in a title should be interpreted, because the spec is vague.
When someone asks for an opinion about the validity of their RSS, as they do I don’t know how many thousands of times a day (since even though I didn’t write most of the validator, being able to commit means I’m jointly responsible for what it says), I want to say “this is what the spec says, see, right here?” not “based on our best guess about the most reasonable interpretation of the union of these five weblog posts, the spec probably meant to say…”
Atom works fine for me as a producer, when I can say that the cost of being misunderstood is higher than the cost of not being heard by un-updated tools, but as a consumer and a consumer advocate, I can’t just make RSS go away, so I want to drop that three months down to the five minutes of looking at the spec that should be all anyone needs. For me, that’s all it’s about: when something breaks, the spec should tell us whose bug it is.
Phil Ringnalda
It seems like tightly spec’ed profile will do what you need.
And I should say that I don’t disagree with what you say. I guess the question behind the question is what does the board have to gain? I really hate sounding like a conspiracy theorist, but when you have an entity whose existance does not seem warranted… or as Sam put it increases “social friction” I want to know what everyone on the board has to gain.
Anyway, while I’m not against a better spec, I am against making it seem like RSS is moving if even a little. If folks want to move they should move to Atom or live with RSS as it is for better or for worse.
Daniel