Re: Thoughts, questions, and issues.

[Aaron Swartz <aswartz@swartzfam.com>]

Paulo Gaspar <Paulo.Gaspar@krankikom.de> wrote:

> Are you serving a community? Or just waiting that the "opposition" quits?

We are trying to advance RSS: RDF Site Summary. There are clearly people for
whom RDF Site Summary, with its use of RDF, namespaces and other so-called
advanced features is not necessary. For those people, there are other
languages and other versions of RSS and we can convert from them.

Somewhere along the way, RDF seemed to change from "RDF Site Summary" to
"Real Simple Syndication" (to borrow a phrase from Dave). For those who want
Real Simple Syndication, this spec is not for you. We've tried to make it
simple, but it won't be "real simple" and it's not completely about
syndication.

I'm sorry we can't be everything to everyone, but we have to give up
something. There are always trade-offs in this world. If you don't like the
direction that this RSS is heading, then you can join Dave Winer and Gary
Teter in their belief that we might need another spec for syndication. I
hope that such splitting is not necessary, but I understand that some would
like to move in that direction.

This is not a fight, it is not a war, it is a spec, and a proposed one at
that. It is subject to change and modification, but I think it sets out a
direction. This is only one direction, there is a whole web to explore.
There is space for many specs and many languages, and there are ways (like
XSLT) to allow us to communicate.

This is just one option, it may not be the right one. The choice is up to
you.

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