Re: Re[4]: [syndication] RSS Modularization Demonstration

["Dave Winer" <dave@userland.com>]

Well, I disagree with your theory about how RSS began, and what it's purpose
was (and is).

I wrote about this in late 1997, along with the first deployment of
<scriptingNews> format, which as I'm sure you know, predated RSS by more
than a year, and was later incorporated into RSS.

http://davenet.userland.com/1997/12/15/scriptingNewsInXML

***Anyway..

So Ian and Rael and others, here's what I propose to do.

I'll watch what you come up with in the way of modules and if there are
interesting ideas in there, I'll propose that we add them directly to RSS,
without adding the complexity of namespaces. I'm guessing that this mostly
meets your objective, is a fair compromise, if not, then we can fork.

You can go the namespaces route, make RSS into a fully buzzword compliant
spec, and if you get support from content developers, then we'll probably
all read that format as well as earlier formats and we'll have happiness. Or
maybe we'll find that the ideas in the modules are what are really
important, and not the modularization itself, and then we can have a simple
spec, and leave the buzzword people to their gyrations, and keep RSS
realllly simple.

Also, to be clear, with the copyright on the RSS 0.91 spec, you can fork it
yourself, even if you don't want to make additions, so if for some reason
you don't want to point to a userland.com URL, you can put the spec on your
server and point to that instead.

Dave