Spoken

E-Commerce Report: Your Personal Shopper With the Initials R.S.S.: Looking for new ways to reach consumers, retailers are using R.S.S., or “really simple syndication,” to feed product alerts to Internet users.
Source: New York Times: Technology

Sam responds: I am continuing to improve the Feed Validator. That’s my interest in this area. [Sounds good.]

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…]

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?]

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

Why formats like RSS 2.0 work: This is what we all have to live with, me, you, everyone involved in RSS. No one has the exclusive right to determine the path forward for RSS, you may influence but you may not decide. You have to sell your ideas, they are not mandates. [—]
Source: Scripting News

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

Using the Feed Validator on RSS: A validator complements a specification, as long as they’re in agreement. In the three years the validator has been around, I’ve asked Sam a half-dozen times about its interpretation of RSS, and each time he was quick to address my concerns. If there’s an area where the validator and board members have disagreed over an aspect of RSS, my experience has been that he eagerly defers to our judgment. [ This can only be a good thing. +1]
Source: Workbench

How RSS can bust through: Fred Wilson says “RSS has to become brain-dead simple to use.”

I’m pretty sure we can do it, but it would require the companies to give up hope of locking users into their software, into their extensions, their mistakes. There are two barriers to brain-dead simplicity.

1. It must be easy to find relevant feeds.
2. Subscription has to be centralized.

[True, tech companies have to stop seeking lock in on subscriptions… but am I going to trust any of these large companies? Nope. I’ve been burned before. No question I would trust a university first… even though I’ve been burned by them as well. I’m not even sure why centralized subscription is necessary, but I think the reading list is a great thing.]
Source: Dave’s Wordpress Blog