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A landmark piece



I pointed to this piece a few days ago on Scripting News, citing the same section that Morbus did earlier today, but I just re-read the article from top to bottom and the closer is, as far as I'm concerned, the anthem for RSS and XML-RPC.
 
http://www.xml.com/pub/a/2001/05/02/champion.html

"The moral of the story for XML seems clear. In the long run, evolutionary pressures will favor markup language specifications built from simple, modular components over monolithic "one size fits all" specs issued by some standards authority. In the short run, the consumers of XML provide the environmental disturbances that determine whether the specmakers are given time to build monolithic but fragile specifications, or if they will be forced to build "stable and flexible complexity" now rather than later.

"The most important thing to remember is that nothing is forcing you to use and support XML specifications that don't meet your real data processing needs. Use the XML specifications and tools that work for you, don't feel compelled to use the spec du jour just because <JustKidding> all the really cool people are talking about the hermeneutics of their RDF ontologies, or how to pipeline their post schema validation information sets.</JustKidding>. Support the organizations, specifications, and vendors which define and implement simple, modular XML components that can survive evolutionary change."