Total confusion in RSS-Land

["Dave Winer" <dave@userland.com>]

> I agree; if we can leverage other work without making ours needlessly
> complex, let's do it, rather than refuse to recognize other work out of
the
> fear that everyone isn't familiar with it, etc.

Well, here's the deal, I'm very confused about what's going on here. I
suppose many other people are as well. I've been reading the archives of
RSS-DEV, after participating and asking directly (a couple of months ago)
where they're going, and never got an answer.

RSS already is something. To have RSS go through this artificial identity
crisis is a waste of a lot of people's hard work and for naught. In the end,
the identity crisis is a no-op because RSS already is something. It has an
identity and a purpose. Look at My.UserLand and My.Netscape. RSS is the
format behind these aggregators. Look at all the sources of RSS. They're
publications.

Anyone who wants to make a real contribution, get busy living on the other
side of the fence, as writers and editors, and understand the issues from
our point of view. Then the format issues that are discussed with such
passion fade into the background, they'll be feature-driven, instead of
trying to bring RDF to world domination, which is something that RSS is
*not* about, the goal will be to enable the Web to have its own syndication
system that follows the grain of the Web.

http://davenet.userland.com/2000/09/29/strangeBedfellows

As long as the format is easy to understand, format issues matter not one
bit. I'm totally unexcited about what's going on here. The only thing that
keeps me here is the investment. But that's fading now too. I have much
bigger things I want to do. This argument that keeps going on focuses all
the attention on some ideas that are way way off-topic.

My fallback is to work on ICE. A community that has professionalism and
wants to go somewhere, and cares what I think. Clearly the RSS folk, whoever
they are, don't care one whit. I'll put my efforts into ICE and learn the
lessons from what happened here.

Dave