Let's try this.

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 specified it, just in spec-ese. It is derived from Dave’s spec, but I DON’T intend to fork it with this effort; the idea here is to document the format in a way that can be normatively referenced by the media type registration, as well as other specs down the line.

Comments appreciated, especially if you find any divergence with the original spec. Dave has told me that he’s ambivalent about this one, which is fine by me; I don’t want to step on his feet, and definately want to give credit where it’s due.

If the community agrees that this is a faithful representation of the RSS 2.0 format as described by Dave, the next step is to request its publication as an Informational RFC, after fixing a few nits (e.g., Paul Hoffman has already pointed out that it should reference RFC2822, not 822).

6 Comments

Jorgen Thelin said:

You already know you have my fully support for this proposal.

See http://www.thearchitect.co.uk/weblog/archives/2003/04/000136.html

Friday, April 18 2003 at 1:15 AM

Doug Ransom said:

I feel this is not a good thing for the RSS community. The very fact RSS 2.0 does not live within a namespace makes it, in my opinion, poorly designed.

Friday, April 18 2003 at 4:37 AM

Mark Nottingham said:

Doug, I know what you’re saying; that’s the biggest problem I have with RSS 2.0 as well.

However, it’s already out there and widely used (the only RSS that does use a namespace is 1.0, and it’s very much in the minority compared to its non-namespaced bretheren). The only alternative is to standardize yet another RSS format, and that’s a direction that I don’t think any of us want to go in anytime soon.

Believe me, I don’t think RSS 2.0 is a perfect format, but it’s the most realistic way to define a base and move on.

Also, having its own media type will allow it to be identified as a format, which mitigates this problem to some extent.

Friday, April 18 2003 at 5:10 AM

Sam Ruby said:

I would agree that the lack of a namespace is the biggest problem with RSS 2.0.

http://www.intertwingly.net/blog/1344.html

Saturday, April 19 2003 at 3:22 AM

Dave Winer said:

BTW, “ambivalent” doesn’t mean “against.” I’m just wary of standards organizations like IETF. Bob Dylan said “Don’t follow leaders watch the parking meters.” I have no idea what that means but it seems to fit.

Sunday, April 20 2003 at 4:59 AM

Gavin Estey said:

Can we remove the 0.91 cruft of:

The value of the width element MUST NOT be greater than 144; if it is not present, consumers MAY assume it to be 88.

The value of the height element MUST NOT be greater than 400; if it is not present, consumers MAY assume it to be 31.

These maximums are a little too arbitary for my liking. I should be able to include as large an image as I want and it should be up to the consumer to decide what to do with it.

Gavin.

Wednesday, April 23 2003 at 8:25 AM

mark nottingham