Re: [syndication] Re: Thoughts, questions, and issues.

[Rael Dornfest <rael@oreilly.com>]

Howdy,

On Mon, 21 Aug 2000, Aaron Swartz wrote:

> Gary Teter <bigdog@bulldogbeach.com> wrote:

...

> It doesn't matter what version the sources are in, it matters what version
> the aggregators read. This is why I've called for an aggregator survey, to
> find out whether RSS 0.9 in widely understood.

Meerkat[1] understands RSS 0.9, 0.91, 1.0, and scriptingNews.

...

> > RSS is in a lot of ways a "populist" spec. This is a point that's been made
> > more eloquently before by others, so I won't belabor it here, except to say
> > that I think the decision to base RSS 1.0 on version 0.9 instead of 0.91
> > feels kind of "ivory tower" to me.
> 
> It's not ivory tower, it's just necessity. If you can show a way to get the
> RDF data and everything else in 1.0 into RSS 0.91, I'm sure the RSS-DEV
> group would adopt it. I think everyone wanted to use RSS 0.91, but they
> couldn't. IMO, it's a nicer spec.

Ivory tower suggests something being handed down from "on high."  Upon
suggestion, we wrote something up that we thought was rather nice, and
opened it up as a mailing list-based working group.  Rather grass-roots, I
would say.

> > (OK, I've chimed in enough without offering anything helpful, so here's a
> > suggestion: RSS 1.0 should be the same as RSS 0.91 except with a
> > quasi-standard set of namespaces. Those who want RDF can add it in "for
> > free", to paraphrase Ken. Oh yeah, and get rid of skipdays/skiphours. :-)

This sounds an awful lot like "throw out what I don't like" -- a valid
want, don't get me wrong.  What we did was go back to something rather
basic and allow folks to build "what they like" without having it bloat
the core and clash with other folks wants, needs, and naming schemes.

Rael

[1] http://meerkat.oreillynet.com

------------------------------------------------------------------
  Rael Dornfest                  rael@oreilly.com
  Maven,                         http://www.oreillynet.com/~rael
  The O'Reilly Network           http://meerkat.oreillynet.com
------------------------------------------------------------------