Standards

[Julian Bond <julian@netmarketseurope.com>]

With all the work on standards and particularly XML standards, I think
we sometimes forget the gap between creating the standard and something
happening in the real world. There's a sequence here from Standard
Protocol to Toolkit to Application to Implementation. But the only bit
that's actually important is the last of these. Without Implementations,
the rest of it is moot.

So what's that go to do with syndication? Well the only thing we can be
sure of is that there are a large number of sites and systems creating
files that are more or less XML and that contain multiple <item>
elements each containing a <title>, a <link> and sometimes a
<description>. Consenting parties can add to this for their own
purposes, and do things that are useful for them, but unless they get a
groundswell of implementations it's not really of relevance for the rest
of us.

So I'd love to know just how many reasonably active RSS feeds are out
there. But the question is a little meaningless. How do you count
Yahoogroups? Or Moreover queries? Or every Manila weblog, even the
dormant ones? I guess the answer is somewhere between 1500 and 15,000.

-- 
Julian Bond eMail: julian@netmarketseurope.com
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