Re: [syndication] What did I get myself into?!

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

James, you have an interesting decision to make.

In case you're interested in digging to find the moment of forking, here it
is:

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/syndication/message/372

Up until that point in time, RSS 0.91 was the dominant format. In fact, at
this point it still is.

In June 2000, a few months before the split, I wrote, with help from the
community a spec for RSS 0.91, to document as best as we could, the current
practice. It was based on a careful reading of the Netscape spec, and
looking at examples of RSS feeds produced by the community.

http://backend.userland.com/rss091

Personally, I encourage you to support this format, and if you want to work
on evolving it, raise questions on the reallySimpleSyndication mail list.

Dave


----- Original Message -----
From: "James Shaw" <yahoo@coveryourasp.com>
To: <syndication@yahoogroups.com>
Sent: Saturday, May 12, 2001 5:50 PM
Subject: [syndication] What did I get myself into?!


> I've looked back at the recent posts, and I'm amazed what goes on
> here and in the (as they're called here) "other" groups.
>
> A few of you posted messages about me and my efforts with STORS.org
> recently, so I thought I'd tell the short story. I write articles on
> my ASP web site and publish them by submitting title, description,
> URL and various other details to directory sites like aspin.com,
> devdex.com, etc where they categorize them. Readers follow their
> links to my site. OK, so that's where I'm coming from.
>
> My gripe was that everyone's form was different, some you can't even
> paste into! So on April 19th I proposed a *very* simple idea of
> everyone using the same names for their form inputs. Within a week
> there was an XML schema, a discussion list and a website.
>
> No-one mentioned RSS, and development was accelerating. Now, 3 weeks
> since the original form idea STORS.org publishes source code for
> publishers to create an XML file and directory sites to read it when
> the XML (or more likely a URL to the XML) is submitted on a standard
> form.
>
> More and more people offered to port my code to other languages and
> platforms, and we were ready to make the big announcement that
> STORS.org was live (scheduled for 2 days from now). And then I get an
> email from Alis.
>
> Much head scratching and frantic reading about RSS ensued. The 3 main
> people behind STORS, me Steve Smith (ASPAlliance) and Pedro Pequeno
> (Aspin) decided to change tack and instead use the established RSS,
> which by all accounts was extensible enough even if we wanted a few
> tweaks.
>
> 2 days later and I'm stunned to see the political nightmare we've
> stepped into. I've subscribed to 4 discussion lists so far. This one,
> reallySimpleSyndication, rss2 and rss-dev.
>
> I'd really like to keep the momentum going and get my new site up
> with code for everyone to use. Quickly. I'm not sure I want to go
> back in the archives to find out where the split(s) occured, or why.
>
> I guess I was just hoping that a 2 year old effort was slick,
> polished, with lots of documentation, sample code in every
> conceivable language and more to the point, an "RSS.org" that was
> running it. (Actually the RDF Site Summary 1.0 docs are very
> impressive)
>
> What am I missing? Feel free to email me offlist if you prefer:
> james@coveryourasp.com
>
>
>
>
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>
>