Re: [syndication] RSS 0.91 DTD: So what now?

[Mark Nottingham <mnot@mnot.net>]

Quoting Dave Winer <dave@userland.com>:

> > Howdy from Hong Kong ;)
> 
> Howdy yourself. I wish I was there with you! I bet it's going to be an
> interesting meeting this year. Is it already Monday there?

Not yet; Sunday morning. A lot of people came in on the SFO->HK United flight 
last night, for the AC meeting as well as holiday before the conference. HK is 
a very, very funky place; I'm having to be real careful not to blow my spending 
money on the first day ;)


> Anyway, I mentioned this because we already have xmlStorageSystem
> deployed.
> It's available for use, and scriptable via SOAP 1.1 and XML-RPC. It's
> already being used by Radio users. I'd like to see it used for other
> purposes. It's just sitting there waiting. ;->

I should take a look at it; sounds cool (I have an app I'm working on in my own 
time that might be able to have fun with it). Unfortunately, it doesn't solve 
the problem, just as using Akamai or any other service; while they address 
reliability in a technical/network sense, they don't address the 
trust/authority issues. Not saying that you would do something bad, but the 
fact that a URI points to something in a domain you control means that you 
control that resource. For software that needs to run relaibly, that isn't 
acceptable, and it's not necessary to fetch it from the network. 

In other words, when a developer or administrator designs/deploys a system that 
counts on documents following a certain convention, as expressed by a DTD, why 
not make that DTD static and local, rather than subjecting your app to the all 
of the variables of having it hosted?