“Design depends largely on constraints.” — Charles Eames
Tuesday, 24 February 2009
Rob Sayre points out that this blog still doesn’t show a preference for Atom, embarrassingly enough. I know that at one point I had a transition plan, and started by generating an Atom feed alongside the RSS, but I...
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Thursday, 15 May 2008
Huh. The Atom Format RFC has been out for a while, and as one of the authors, I get the odd mail now and again asking a question or just saying “thanks.” In the last week or two, however, there’s...
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Saturday, 8 September 2007
Feed Paging and Archiving (nee Feed History) has finally made it to a standards-track RFC. For many non-traditional (read: non-blog) applications of Atom, I think archived feeds in particular are going to be vital. I’m already using it in...
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Thursday, 5 April 2007
We’ve announced the program for this years’ Developers’ Track, and I’m very excited about the lineup. For example, Ryan Boyd from Google will be presenting about GData right before Pasha Sadri talks about Yahoo! Pipes. These are two cutting-edge...
Wednesday, 7 February 2007
Yahoo! (finally!) released Pipes as a beta today; congrats to the very talented team that put this together. Niall gives the geeks-eye view, and to be clear, this is not going to be the next great consumer Web site;...
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Thursday, 22 June 2006
Recently, there’s been a resurgence for the Link element in HTML; everything from Microformats to Atom autodiscovery is using it. This isn’t surprising; as machines start processing Web documents more, it’s necessary to use hyperlinks — the foundation of...
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Friday, 9 June 2006
See if your aggregator can subscribe to this feed (username/password: test/test) and post the results in comments.While you’re there, it would be interesting to know what happens if you shut down / log out of your aggregator, get back...
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Wednesday, 1 March 2006
Over the weekend, I submitted a new draft of Feed History. The big (and hopefully, last) change this time is the use of the “previous” and “subscription” Atom link relations, rather than extension elements. Of course, just because they’re...
Wednesday, 25 January 2006
About two years ago, I got a little grouchy about those little orange XML buttons, and exhorted people to label them properly with RSS. Then came along a little thing called Atom, and “RSS” doesn’t necessarily cover it. Besides...
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Friday, 13 January 2006
The RSS Tutorial for Content Publishers and Webmasters has been translated to Brazilian Portuguese, thanks to the efforts of Maurício Samy Silva. Note that while the title says “RSS”, it isn’t limited to that; or as Maurício wrote, Apresenta...
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Monday, 26 December 2005
Another year has gone by, and rather than cataloguing music, movies or books that I liked, here are some feeds on the Web that I enjoyed reading throughout the year. I’ll avoid repeating the obvious news, technical and blogroll...
Monday, 5 December 2005
Atom has finally realised its most important advantage over the various flavours of RSS — it’s a Standards-Track RFC. What does this mean? It doesn’t mean that it’s (necessarily) technically better, is easier to use, or will be more...
Wednesday, 26 October 2005
Does anybody know of a program or service that will look at a calendar file (e.g., vCalendar, iCalendar, hCalendar) and publish the entries on it as an RSS feed, where each entry in the feed has a link to that...
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Monday, 5 September 2005
Feed History draft -04 is out, with the only major change being the replacement of fh:stateful with fh:incremental, with corresponding changes throughout the document, to make the concepts a bit clearer. This revision also makes cardinality, relative URIs and...
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Thursday, 1 September 2005
I took a pass at a revision of the RSS Tutorial for Content Publishers and Webmasters on the train this morning, as I realised it was dreadfully out of date. It now includes Atom, and RSS 2.0, rather than...
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Monday, 15 August 2005
I’ve had a few e-mails asking how I got this site’s RSS feed to include its history, so here are the instructions for doing it in Moveable Type (the software that I use to manage this site). If you...
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Monday, 15 August 2005
Draft -03 of Feed History: Enabling Stateful Syndication is now available. Significant changes include: Added fh:archive element, to indicate that an entry is an archive Allow subscription feed to omit fh:stateful if fh:prev is present Clarified that fh doesn’t...
Saturday, 16 July 2005
After more than five years, syndication is maturing rapidly. It’s being used for more than blogging — whether it be stock quotes, system logs, or order lists — and even blogging will change in nature as it gets more...
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Friday, 15 July 2005
It’s been covered before elsewhere, but just a friendly reminder: ‘feed’ URIs are bad for the Web, as are any that are used solely for dispatch (e.g., ‘itms’, ‘pcast’). I’m looking at you, Apple. Interestingly, Apple also supports doing...
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Sunday, 24 April 2005
Should cookies be shared between your RSS aggregator and your Web browser? If they were, sites would be able to automatically personalise the feeds you subscribe to; would people be interested in that, or see it as an intrusion...
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Tuesday, 12 April 2005
Way back when I put the first Atom drafts together, I included a placeholder for a section that I hoped would allow reconstruction of feed state. Presently, this often isn’t necessary, because you have to be away for a...
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Monday, 2 August 2004
Melbourne’s The Age now has RSS feeds available — hooray! I’ve been scraping them and bugging the staff for a while, so it’s nice to see that Fairfax (now “Fairfax Digital” instead of “f2”… whatever) finally get it. Oh, and...
Tuesday, 18 May 2004
A few people got together in NYC to talk about Atom going to the W3C this morning. One part of the minutes of this discussion raised my eyebrows a fair amount; sr: […] Lots of people are saying RSS won’t...
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Monday, 1 March 2004
This just popped up on the iTunes “new releases” list. I think we’re going to see some Atom-related products called “Tomato.”...
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Sunday, 15 February 2004
One of the problems facing the syndication community as a whole is the number of formats that have been minted. This a particular concern for Atom as the newcomer; a common argument against it is that RSS content will never...
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Wednesday, 28 January 2004
It’s like having a “get your ASCII here” button; completely meaningless. There are literally thousands of XML formats out there, so you’re not really being helpful by labelling it as such (the */xml media types have similar problems). If you...
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Thursday, 22 January 2004
This is the way syndication should be; user-customisable and aligned with the Web view of the resources it talks about. Cool. I’ve updated the RSS Tutorial to point to this as a shining example; it’s what all RSS feeds should...
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Friday, 12 December 2003
As you may know, I’m editing the Atom format draft in my copious spare time, but not actively participating in the community (I am watching, but I don’t have the time to really dig in). I think this is healthy,...
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Thursday, 11 December 2003
Tim Bray's latest missive contains a passage about offline RSS; But, pointed out Sam, think of it as a synchronization/offline problem. If I stick the whole essay in the feed, then someone can read it even when they're offline, because...
Friday, 3 October 2003
Jeremy Allaire is writing about something he calls RSS-Data, and I must say it touches on a lot of interesting points. A few; data encoding - Jeremy's view of SOAP Encoding (aka "Section 5 Encoding") seems to be contrary to...
Wednesday, 24 September 2003
Tim Bray wonders what the difference between an RSS feed delivered via HTTP and an e-mail folder (e.g., via IMAP) is; I've wondered the same thing myself. As far as I can tell; * Subscribing to an RSS feed is...
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Sunday, 24 August 2003
Somehow, I've been drafted into editing the Atom syntax specification, and have just thrown up a first draft. I'm reasonably happy with the language around the requirements, but a lot more needs to be said about conformance (maybe it's all...
Monday, 4 August 2003
RSSJobs looks interesting; hopefully, we'll see more of these "non-traditional" uses of RSS as time goes by....
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Monday, 21 July 2003
Back when we were exploring the possibity of a profile of RSS, I set up a wiki on the topic and promptly let it run wild, to see what would happen. Although most people have moved on to other approaches...
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Friday, 18 July 2003
Dave Winer has announced a few changes to RSS, which seem positive at first glance, but need a little closer inspection. It appears that the copyright for RSS 2.0 is now in the hands of Harvard Law school, and maintained...
Tuesday, 24 June 2003
Sam Ruby suggests a roadmap for a new effort that may very well replace RSS. I and many other people have been tempted in the past to do this, and the landscape is littered with the their bones (always wanted...
Sunday, 22 June 2003
Mark Baker responded to my thoughts on RSS history a while back, and I'm *finally* getting around to responding (nothing like a hotel lobby to clear your thoughts...). I agree very much with just about everthing Mark says; RSS feeds...
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Monday, 16 June 2003
Sam Ruby has announced a Wiki about what a weblog entry is. Couple of things out of the way first; * 'log' is confusing; I thought he was talking about logfile formats when I first saw it. Call it a...
Thursday, 12 June 2003
I'm surprised by Dave Winer's continuing reluctance to identify RSS 2.0 with a namespace, given howstrongly he feels about interoperability and respecting format definitions. If RSS 2.0 had a namespace, the conformance and semantics of a particular RSS document would...
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Wednesday, 4 June 2003
Tim Bray is looking for an RSS soundbite, what some people would call an elevator pitch, I suppose (aren't they supposed to be level? Never mind). I made an attempt at motivating RSS for people a while back, in the...
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Wednesday, 28 May 2003
Dave Winer argues that RSS implementers should toe the line: The same philosophy dictates an end to the disagreement over RSS. If they want respect for the formats and protocols they implement, they must do RSS exactly as UserLand does....
Sunday, 25 May 2003
Tim Bray thinks out loud about mechanisms to allow RSS subscribers to be counted. His poison of choice is adding a query components to the URI in the Referrer header. I don't think that this is such a hot approach,...
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Sunday, 11 May 2003
Don wants to send RSS to OASIS, of all places. Doesn't that mean it'll have to be corporations standardizing it? Urgh. I agree with most of Tim's assessment; the IETF is the most hospitable place for this. I'm happy to...
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Saturday, 10 May 2003
Don, Sam, Ben, Mena and others have started blogging about a profile of RSS. I don't think blogs are the best medium for this kind of development - it's too hard to follow a thread, and it's too easy for...
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Saturday, 3 May 2003
Excellent. Danny Ayers proposes a Simple Semantic Resolution RSS 2.0 Module. This approach is the most sensible for ANY application of Semantic Web technology (as I've argued before). Rather than foisting RDF's ugly, unusable XML syntax on applications, map from...
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Saturday, 3 May 2003
I'm setting up a weblog for a fairly well-known colleague, and doing some traffic estimates to try to size his server. Assumptions: * 5000 people will eventually subscribe to the weblog * Each person's aggregator will poll once an hour...
Tuesday, 29 April 2003
Sam mentions dc:date; that's what I was thinking, except that 'date' on its own is pretty useless. As Bill points out, dcterms gives you different date semantics. dcterms:issued seems to match RSS's pubDate most closely, while as far as I...
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Monday, 28 April 2003
[ I tried to post this as a comment on Sam's blog, but I think there may still be transitional issues over there... ] Overlord? COOL... I don't think I've ever been the overlord of anything. Seriously, as Sam says,...
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Sunday, 27 April 2003
For discussion: RSS history module (the eventual result of this)....
Tuesday, 22 April 2003
Tim says thatRSS Needs Fixing. Right on! Some people are intereted in endless tinkering with RSS - I'm not. I'm interested in putting it on everybody's desktop, and making it transparent to them. This means we need better interop. How...
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Tuesday, 22 April 2003
Sam proposes some changes to RSS 2.0 regarding namespaces. My first question was, "why?" but upon reading his next post, I get it. The Big Problem with namespaces the first time around was that it broke some software, which Dave...
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Saturday, 19 April 2003
RSS.py has been revved; fixed some problems with addItem (now takes an index argument to say where to add the item; default is first - used to be last), and a few other tweaks. Yes, I am aware of the...
Friday, 18 April 2003
Don's worried about the glaciating influences of having a stable spec for RSS 2.0. I couldn't disagree more. Like Don, RSS is my hobby; has been since about 1999, when I started the Syndication list. I watched and occasionally pitched...
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Friday, 18 April 2003
RSS needs a bit of stablity (as I've often said), so I've gotten off of my duff and done something about it. For your interest, an Internet-Draft of RSS 2.0. As it says, this is RSS 2.0, as Dave has...
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Sunday, 8 December 2002
Wouldn't it be great if The Royal Society, the Commonwealth Club and your local council all had RSS feeds available, conspiquous and up-to-date?...
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Monday, 25 November 2002
Almost forgot - today I put an exploration of the semantics of RSS:Channel out there for comment. I've been thinking about various aspects of this for a while; not sure how far I've gotten, but I think it's important to...
Monday, 25 November 2002
RSS: XHTML Profile, to me, is another proof that syntax isn't important, as long as you can boil whatever you get down to a format you know. Nice job!...
Tuesday, 3 September 2002
I see Dave is once again rev'ing RSS. I have reservations about the some of the new mechanisms (e.g., shoe-horning MIME into XML is a horrible idea) but I'm encouraged by hints that using XML Namespaces is being considered....
Saturday, 24 August 2002
Interesting; I'm glad thiswas written, because RDF is good stuff, and this is a good walkthrough. However, it still doesn't approach what I see as the critical problems with using RDF in RSS. First of all, considering that it's trying...