Survey on the evolution of RSS

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

The discussion about the future of RSS continues. This morning I'm running a
survey to solicit the opinion of Scripting News readers. I've tried to draft
the choices to reflect the common advocacy for each of the levels.

Some of the discussers have said that members of this mail list favor one
approach, but as far as I know there's been no systematic attempt to poll
the list so that individuals can clearly express a preference.

The survey is here:

http://surveys.userland.com/surveys/run/dave@userland.com/howToEvolveRss

(UserLand.Com membership is required. Each member has one vote, you can
change your vote.)

Here's the text in the survey form:

<responses>
   <response id="choice1">It's fine exactly as it is, don't change a
thing.</response>
   <response id="choice2">Add a few elements so it can become richer. It's a
maturing format with a large installed base, it needs to grow slowly to fit
the needs of content developers and aggregators, but keep it simple, that's
the biggest thing it's got going for it.</response>
   <response id="choice3">Add "semantic sugar" for XML Namespaces so
developers can use the Dublin Core and create their own vocabularies. This
is a good thing to do because it avoids silly innovations like the "blink"
tag, as happened in the browser wars between Microsoft and
Netscape.</response>
   <response id="choice4">Add namespaces as above and add required elements
that make it part of RDF, so developers can build new kinds of databases and
search engines that will do dramatic new things, not just with syndicated
Web content, but all kinds of information.</response>
   <response id="choice5">I don't have an opinion about how RSS should
evolve.</response>
   </responses>

Dave