Re: [syndication] Thoughts, questions, and issues.

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

I'm glad you're lookin at this stuff Stephen.

Tell us more about what you see in iSyndicate's RSS feeds.

Why don't we just adopt what they're using and add it to RSS?

Bring them to the table, and ask them to make a contribution. I know the
people at iSyndicate, we had philosophic differences when this stuff
started, but now we're singing almost the same tune.

By going the "extensibility" route you're going to raise the barrier to
stratospheric levels, you'll never see those 6 million feeds, it will
coalesce to just a few sources.

I've done lots of tech support on this. I speak from a different kind of
experience. I struggled with developers at all size publications to get
their scripts working. If the spec were scattered over a dozen different
sites, you won't get what you want. We'd still need a central spec, but
instead of being a standard, it would be a "best practices" document, and of
course there will be many such documents, of varying quality. You'll find it
all balkanized, one aggregator will read one tag, and another will read
another. There might be subtle differences. Newbies will stay away.

To me the question is how to bring the power of publishing to the masses.
You don't get there by obscuring the details and making people walk a maze
of varying quality to figure out how to express themselves. When you make us
walk a maze, we walk away. There's always something more interesting to do.

Dave



----- Original Message -----
From: "Stephen Downes" <stephen.downes@ualberta.ca>
To: <syndication@egroups.com>
Sent: Wednesday, August 16, 2000 7:50 AM
Subject: Re: [syndication] Thoughts, questions, and issues.


> Dave Winer wrote:
>
> > Stephen, with all due respect, we have two schools of thought here.
> > The extensibility school thinks they're right. They've moved
aggressively,
> > and call their spec RSS 1.0.
> > Those of us who believe in simplicity and working together, think RSS
should
> > go in a different direction. I gather you don't agree.
> > So what's the solution? How do we avoid a total meltdown? How do we
avoid
> > having two specs with the same name?
>
> OK, the biggest problem I've encountered so far reading RSS and other
> site summary files is the proliferation of formats which already exists.
For
> me, what this means is writing code for each different type. It doesn't
have
> to be a lot of code (and it isn't), but I don't like where this is
heading. If
> I have to deal with six or seven different flavours to handle even the
6000+
> feeds that are out there, how am I going to be able to write code when
> there are 6 million feeds?
>
> What I see happening is that each developer adapts the standards to his
> or her own needs. I just viewed iSyndicate's RSS feeds, for example,
> and saw yet another variation on the theme. It's recognizably RSS, sure,
> but I have to parse the file slightly differently in order to extract the
> channels. And I don't blame iSyndicate - I think they're doing what they
> should do. But the fact is iSyndicate - and Scripting News, and Userland,
> and Moreover, and more... each adapt the standard slightly to fit their
> own needs. I don't see this ending, and as a result I think that any
simple
> and rigid spec will be left behind.
>
> This because provider sites know that aggregators will adapt their
> scripts - with reason - to collect the content.
>
> This is why I am in favour of extensibility. It allows a site to define a
> flavour or variation, to code it in a schema or DTD, and to allow
> aggregators to parse content based on that schema. No code rewrites.
> Happiness all around.
>
> This is why I am also in favour of a distributed approach. Not all
> aggregators want everything. Some just want headlines. Some just
> want staff listings. Some just want keywords. A distributed approach
> lets an aggregator scan a site summary and then to drill down to
> more precise summaries to get at what they want.
>
> I don't think a 'one size fits all' approach will ever work on the web
> ever again (as if it ever worked in the first place). I want simple -
> I really want simple - but not at the cost of flexibility. And yes, I
> do believe in working together, and I think that also requires
> flexibility.
>
> --
> Stephen Downes - Information Architect - University of Alberta
> stephen.downes@ualberta.ca  http://www.atl.ualberta.ca/downes
>
>
>
> 
>
>
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