Re: [syndication] Dear Rael and Ken and Jeff

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

Interesting! Some philosophy emerges. This is good.

Now having lurked on your mail list, I'd say the arguments about "where
things go" or "what they're called" have gotten just as complicated and
"centralized" much like any other XML developer list.

And there's a bug -- it's keeps out the people who create content, just like
all the other XML developer lists.

Congratulations Dan, you've managed to disenfranchise the very people who
RSS was designed for!

They simply can't understand what you're talking about.

(Which, by the way, is precisely the same reason XHTML is languishing, even
though it's quite rational and a good idea.)

Your process has a big bug, which wouldn't have been a problem if you hadn't
tried to force it on us!

(I just finished reading a Kurt Vonnegut book [1] where he uses lots of
exclamation points and thought maybe I don't use enough!)

Another moral. Face to face meetings are big stuff. We should all feel free
to meet with people who are geographically compatible, and talk about where
we want RSS to go (or stay).

Dave

[1] Bluebeard


----- Original Message -----
From: "Dan Brickley" <Daniel.Brickley@bristol.ac.uk>
To: "Dave Winer" <dave@userland.com>
Cc: "syndication" <syndication@yahoogroups.com>
Sent: Tuesday, May 29, 2001 2:02 AM
Subject: Re: [syndication] Dear Rael and Ken and Jeff


>
>
> Thanks for the advice, Dave.
>
>
> I agree with about half of what you say. You can probably guess which
bits.
>
> Being "user centric" can often turn out to be a marketing
> cliche. Contrary to your view of the RSS/admin proposal, I believe we're
> seeing some progress here on being genuinely "user centric" with
> RSS. Ken took some requirements (sure, from the aggregator rather than
> content-producer community) are articulated them in the technical
> terminology of XML (content models) and RDF (URI-named properties). This
> seems right to me: it's up to the geeks to map user needs onto
> technological nitty gritty.
>
> The approach taken in RSS 1.0 was designed to make this easier. If some
> users want (for example) to associate personal or organisational
> homepages with channels, or channel items, somone just needs to write
> up how to representing these new constructs within an RSS 1.0
> file. Sure, that latter task requires some geekiness, but the overall
> architecture allows for us to do this in parallel. We don't need to
> argue whether the proposed extension is "in" or "out" of RSS v1.x, we
> just write it up and get on with our lives.
>
> This strikes me as pretty good on the decentralisation front, devolving
> control of the spec's evolution to "the people". Anyone can propose and
> use RSS extensions without centralised blessing. Of course only a
> relative few are geeky enough right now to do the technical authoring of
> those extension modules; that's why it is important to have people play
> the go-between role of writing up proposals for the community so they
> can be experimentally deployed.
>
> RSS 1.0 is all about relinquishing centralised control...
>
> danbri
>
>
> --
> mailto:danbri@rdfweb.org
> http://purl.org/net/danbri/
>