Re: Thoughts, questions, and issues.

[Aaron Swartz <aswartz@swartzfam.com>]

zac <zac@pixelgeek.com> wrote:

> I curious as to the thoughts of others on this list to the points that Lynn
> brought up.
>> If people like me, content generators, are the end users, you're
>> losing us. I'm more technical than most of my fellows, and I have to
>> say I don't understand a damn thing about this new spec. It seems
>> extremely complicated.

http://www.egroups.com/message/syndication/445

I think the answer from the RSS-DEV people (I'm sort of guessing, correct me
if I'm wrong) is that the writers shouldn't have to understand the spec --
they should be able to use tools that will generate the RSS for them.

> I understand the current RSS 0.91
> just fine, as well as scriptingNews format.

Alright, so keep writing in RSS 0.9 and use the many on-line converters
(already previously mentioned in this discussion) to convert it to the new
format. If you'd like, I'm sure Jonathan would be more than willing to
update his RSS Channel Editor
(http://www.webreference.com/cgi-bin/perl/rssedit.pl) to version 1.0 so that
you can create the RSS through Web interface -- much friendlier than writing
it out by hand. 

The fact is, as far as I'm concerned, nobody but the programmers should have
to deal with these specs. There seems to be a lot of confusion here, that
RSS files are meant to be written by hand. Perhaps that was true with the
old spec, but it doesn't need to be, and is even less true with the new one.
The specs are written for programmers, to allow them to write programs that
communicate. The programmers have already begun to write them and you can
see the first few over at:

http://www.egroups.com/files/rss-dev/Tools/

To the writers -- don't worry, we haven't forgotten about you. In fact, we
care about you more than ever. You don't need to be messing with the XML by
hand -- that's not what it's designed for, it's designed for programs. We've
tried to create programs so that you don't have to generate the RSS file by
hand, you can convert to it or do it through a web interface. If you still
have trouble, let us know, we're here to help, not to scare.

Lynn, I promise not to forget the writers -- I'm one too.

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