Re: Thoughts, questions, and issues.

[Aaron Swartz <aswartz@swartzfam.com>]

Dave Winer <dave@userland.com> wrote:

> Aaron, I wrote a whole essay about this just this morning.

I've read that Dave (and a whole lot more of the history), but I still don't
understand. If you're worried that people are all going to go off and create
their own modules, which will be incompatible, then I have some sad news for
you: they're going to do it anyway. As you can see, iSyndicate has already
started and it's only going to get worse. With namespaces, we can add
extensions while still leaving some compatibility. It's an improvement over
what would happen without them, which is everyone will try and change the
format slightly for their own needs.

What's your solution? Force people to all use a set of "approved" additions
to the spec. That sounds very similar to the approval process Rael just
proposed on the RSS list:

http://www.egroups.com/message/rss-dev/53

With it, all the people who are interested in a specific module try to come
to an agreement on it. When we reach consensus, the module is "adopted" by
the RSS spec. Because we're using namespaces, RSS documents that use the
modules will still be backwards-compatible but will allow people to take
advantage of the new functionality they provide. If you want people to only
use approved additions, tell them to only use the ones in the spec.

Why doesn't that work? What are your other concerns? Let's try and resolve
things, so we can avoid a fight. Perhaps it would help if you wrote out a
list of the problems with the 1.0 proposal.

-- 
        Aaron Swartz         |"This information is top security.
<http://swartzfam.com/aaron/>|     When you have read it, destroy yourself."
  <http://www.theinfo.org/>  |             - Marshall McLuhan