Spoken

Jon Udell: RSS politics: I had hoped that RSS itself could move forward, but Dave was right and I was wrong. It cannot and should not. It is what it is, it delivers great value, and it will continue to do so for millions of people for years to come. In theory it could evolve at the core, as well as by way of the modular extensions that Apple, Amazon, Microsoft, and others are creating. But in practice that’s politically impossible. So use RSS for all its excellent strengths, but don’t expect it to solve every problem. If you have a problem RSS can’t solve – and for what it’s worth, I currently don’t – then look to Atom. [Sounds like what I said…]

What Dave Said: Nobody can say Dave hasn’t been 100% crystal-clear about this. Those of us who thought there was basic, important work that still needed doing in the area of syndication formats had three choices; RDF-wrangling in the RSS 1.0 context, namespace-wrangling in the RSS 2.0 context, and putting a new name on it; to use Dave’s words, “make a new format as an evolution”. Thus, Atom. We don’t have to agree about everything, but if the Internet depends on anything, it depends on standards that are stable, and the framework of trust around that stability. [Nicely put.]
Source: Tim Bray

Mr Safe: Well, the effective content model for RSS has been described as “Here’s something that might be HTML. Or maybe not. I can’t tell you, and you can’t guess.” so things that look like HTML are routinely misinterpreted. The author of FeedDemon indicates that he gets multiple bug reports per week on this issue alone. [Sam fires back…]
Source: Sam Ruby