Re: [syndication] Dear Rael and Ken and Jeff

[Dan Brickley <daniel.brickley@bristol.ac.uk>]

Thanks for the advice, Dave.


I agree with about half of what you say. You can probably guess which bits.

Being "user centric" can often turn out to be a marketing
cliche. Contrary to your view of the RSS/admin proposal, I believe we're
seeing some progress here on being genuinely "user centric" with
RSS. Ken took some requirements (sure, from the aggregator rather than
content-producer community) are articulated them in the technical
terminology of XML (content models) and RDF (URI-named properties). This
seems right to me: it's up to the geeks to map user needs onto
technological nitty gritty. 

The approach taken in RSS 1.0 was designed to make this easier. If some
users want (for example) to associate personal or organisational
homepages with channels, or channel items, somone just needs to write
up how to representing these new constructs within an RSS 1.0
file. Sure, that latter task requires some geekiness, but the overall
architecture allows for us to do this in parallel. We don't need to
argue whether the proposed extension is "in" or "out" of RSS v1.x, we
just write it up and get on with our lives. 

This strikes me as pretty good on the decentralisation front, devolving
control of the spec's evolution to "the people". Anyone can propose and
use RSS extensions without centralised blessing. Of course only a
relative few are geeky enough right now to do the technical authoring of
those extension modules; that's why it is important to have people play
the go-between role of writing up proposals for the community so they
can be experimentally deployed. 

RSS 1.0 is all about relinquishing centralised control...

danbri


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