Re: [syndication] NameSplitting

[Julian Bond <julian@netmarketseurope.com>]

Two pennyworth...

In article <NEBBIIHGCLNJBKNCFIGLOEAECPAA.jeff@vertexdev.com>, Jeff Barr
<jeff@vertexdev.com> writes
>True, but we can handle this by supplying cross-referential links in
>both specs. Perhaps we can even agree on a section titled "Which
>syndication format should I use?" I think this would address most
>of the issues raised later in your email.

This needs bootstrapping. Both sides and anyone else who has a
commentary page should just start adding this detail. If it's written in
a non-combative way, there's no need for any formal agreement before
it's published.

>> More to the point, Syndication as a whole is still catching on. I've
>> been asking a lot of content providers to make their wares available
>> in RSS lately, and by far the most common response is, "what?"
>
>Ok, but if they do not know about it then there should not be any
>harm in changing the name. I evangelize a lot of sites (several per
>day). Most of them know about syndication but few know about formats.

I was hopeful that a few more FAQ pages would get written to help deal
with this. But seriously, the RSS pages on both
http://www.oreillynet.com and Userland need a little work. I've spent
way too much time this year trying to track down specs and commentary on
both sites.

I seem to have said this before but evangelizing syndication would be a
great deal easier if there was a clear FAQ to point to (at a short
URL!). 

>we will be buried in syndicated 
>content. That's the real goal, right?

Absolutely.

Since people are chucking names in the pot, I'd like to suggest two.

RSS 1.0      => RDFSS 1.0   //RDF Site Summary 
RSS 0.92     => RSSML 1.0   //Really Simple Syndication Markup Language
RSS 0.90/1   => stet

There's enough similarity to show the history. The names are self
explanatory. It's Solomon's Judgement of cutting the baby in half by
asking both sides to rename going forward. And 0.90 / 0.91 have too much
momentum and implementations to change now. And they're both short. I
hate all this "RSS Semantic" verbiage.

So we end up with two clearly defined recommendations and a third legacy
that will progressively convert to one or the other (or not). It's then
in the interests of both sides to make sure that any parser of one or
the other can also parse 0.90/1 with no special effort. This also has
the advantage that an aggregator that only uses the 0.91 elements can
parse any of the three with no special effort.

-- 
Julian Bond eMail: julian@netmarketseurope.com
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