Re: [syndication] Dear Ken

[Morbus Iff <morbus@disobey.com>]

>1. I will stand down as the defacto leader of the simple approach to RSS,
>2. I'll pass the baton to someone who isn't so convenient a target for your
>3. Along with this, you will also stand down, by renaming the RDF and

Personally, although I like the plan, I don't think it will work. I'm of
the Winer field of thought - RSS 1.0 is much too complicated and unwieldy.
I will never create an RSS feed of that type myself - I'll use a proxy
creator like Aaron Swartz's "Syndicate Your Page" to do something like
that. In that regard, I'll probably stick with 0.91. Works for me (myself,
I dislike .92, and by association, .93 and beyond). I don't need the
complexity of RDF, so why should I bother to write feeds in that format?
Newbies see RSS, and they say "ooh. I'll learn RSS." And then they see
"RDF" and "namespaces" and "modules" and all this other crap. Newbies think
they need to learn everything. What should be an evening becomes a weekend.
Not good. I digress.

I do think that Winer, respectfully, is a pain in the ass, and often goes
overboard in conversations and his fervent flavoring. I don't think that's
a fallacy of Winer, however. I agree with much of what he says, once you
get past a lot of the flame/troll bait. I also, however, agree with his
opponents, again, once you get past the flame/troll bait.

I think Dave's personality will stop 1). It sounds good on paper, but I
don't think Dave has it in him, on an inherent/instinctual level, to let it
go just like that.

Regarding 3), I don't think the RSS 1.0 people will agree to that. While
Dave's blinding fervency for .9x will never let him satisfy 1), I think the
blinding "no! this is helping the community" (even when I believe it's not)
of the RSS 1.0 people will stop them from doing the same. Dvorak etched
this whole theory long ago - XML is heading toward a mass of people
quibbling about which is right, which is wrong, and which is the best, all
the while losing the ideals that supposedly made XML the future of the Net.
As Bray said recently, the net is too damn slow (or something like that),
and its the fault of quibbling, not laziness.

For newbies, they'll look at version numbers, and see 1.0 and think that is
the epitome of RSS, and the others were "beta tests". Newbies don't have
time to worry about the intricate histories of the format, nor do they want
to be assaulted by overbearing camps about which is better. So, the
leapfrogging forces the "newness" of newbies. Newbies inherently want to be
on the latest end of things, not learning old formats. That is one of the
reasons Netscape leaped to 6.0. Why should people use a 5.0 browser, when
IE 6 is just around the corner?

Much as I bitch, I don't have a solution all that much either. Although, I
think it's more along the line of 3) above. Renaming would solve a lot of
things. Say you have RSS and RSS/RDF:

   RSS is the Winer version. Because of the renaming of 1.0 to RSS/RDF,
   it can climb in version numbers as dearly as it needs to. That
   stops the versioning issue mentioned on the other lists.

   RSS/RDF is a more descriptive term for the 1.0 format anyways.
   I never liked the 1.0 monikker in the first place, not because
   of Winer love, but because the inherent enhancements of the
   format were untested in the syndication field.

But who am I, eh?


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