Re: Thoughts, questions, and issues.

[Aaron Swartz <aswartz@swartzfam.com>]

Lynn Siprelle <lynn@siprelle.com> wrote:

> Aaron, I have nothing but respect for you, *believe* me, but this is
> just a little too close to "don't worry your purty li'l head about
> it, missy."

I'm so sorry -- I tried to stay away from that, but I guess I didn't do too
good of a job. I have nothing but respect for you, Lynn. I love your site
and I'm very impressed. Please don't take this the wrong way. I'd say the
same thing to myself. When I'm coding, I don't _want_ to worry about the
spec -- I just want to get the job done. I expect you feel the same way.

> OK, fine, so I can find some tool somewhere to generate the RSS file
> for me. But what if I want to parse one, which I will? I *still* have
> to understand the spec, and I don't. And I'm neither stupid nor
> technically illiterate, though obviously not at the level of this
> august company.

I don't want to make it sound like we're the high priests of some strange
"order of RSS" -- we're not. And you don't even have to understand the spec
to parse RSS -- only to write a parser. And there are already parsers out
there (at least for Perl, and I believe Dave wrote one for Radio UserLand)
that'll do all the spec-understanding for you.

Even so, I still don't see why you find the spec so complicated. The only
thing that was really was an rdf:about attribute and an inchannel element.
If you ignore those (and a few others), the file ends up being the same as
RSS 0.9. Maybe you could help explain what's so mystifying about the spec,
so that the authors could perhaps clean things up. We want to help, we
really do.

> It's not just the simple writers you'll need to worry about. It's the
> simple webmasters who are doing things with RSS files now and who
> will get tripped up by these changes. If you've ever done tech
> support (and I have) you know that there are all kinds of people out
> there doing this stuff--brilliant kids like Aaron and old duffers who
> just wanna put up photos of the grandkids, and everyone in between.

Oh, I definitely know what you mean. But here's how I see it:

Writers: 
    1) Use an automated RSS creator
    2) Use a web-based RSS creator with a nice interface
    2) Use a converter from the simple format to the more complex

Readers:
    1) Use a pre-built RSS parser (like XML::RSS for Perl)
    2) Use a down-converter to a simpler format
    3) Ignore the new additions and just use the old stuff

I think there are plenty of options, if you don't want to have to understand
the new spec. What do you think Lynn?

> Anyway. Enough from me.

Please, continue to contribute, Lynn. Yours is a position that isn't being
represented too well, and we need you to represent it. We _want_ to help the
writers, so we need to hear it from their point of view. What can we do to
help?

Thanks for letting us hear it from your POV,

-- 
        Aaron Swartz         |"This information is top security.
<http://swartzfam.com/aaron/>|     When you have read it, destroy yourself."
  <http://www.theinfo.org/>  |             - Marshall McLuhan