Re: [syndication] RSS 0.94

[Morbus Iff <morbus@disobey.com>]

>http://www.userland.com/whatIsStopEnergy

Dave, that's all fine and good, and I *agree* with the mentality behind it.
But this is an RSS *specification* - specs live and thrive on threaded
discussions and archiving, both for future back-reference, historical
researching, and a single "place" for locating the work and thoughts put
forth on it.

All these "standard" discussion techniques are
being put to pasture with your latest attempt.

 - there is no threading, so people can't see
   an evolutionary thought process, or narrow down
   their interest to a single thought - instead,
   they have to hunt around everywhere, reading
   bloat that may not interest me (granted, bloat
   happens on mailing lists too).

 - there is no archiving, because we can't hope that
   the users who participate understand the concepts
   behind permaURLs, nor can we assume they have
   the intelligence to keep their servers running
   until the end of time (as per, say, a Yahoo
   mailing list). We also can't depend on Alexa or
   Google to archive the pages. In essence, when
   Joe Bob winks off the net, there goes a piece
   of spec history.

 - there is no single place for locating the effort.
   since the discussion is spread out against multiple
   sites, historical researching and central repository
   goes out the window. Instead, we have an omnipotent
   librarian who controls the information archived by
   linking to only that which he deems important.
   Censorship, Revisionism, etc, what have you.

The lack of the above is even more egregious because RSS is a standard used
by thousands and thousands of people. This is a standard and a
specification, and it's vitally important. I can see losing the above
benefits over something like a dissertation on female cartoon characters,
but not on something that people will actually be using.

On a more personal note: I can't participate. I'm sure you'll think I'm
stopEnergy (or later, humble yourself by saying 'yes, let Morbus play'),
but there is no way I can participate in this discussion or spec now. Email
is a crucial part of my daily process - joining mailing lists based on
interests is right up there too. That's all gone now - I can't read or
filter email based on the RSS v0.94 discussion. Instead, I have to go to
one man (you), trust your integrity (which has always, in my view, been
challenged), and read your links. This means that my online time will be
increased (due to running around to bandwidth heavy websites as opposed to
reading text-only email) - if I were in a foreign country, participating
now means spending more money (due to per-minute dialup charges).

There's so much more stuff I want to explain concerning how this is a bad
approach, but your attempt at minimizing stopEnergy has become stopEnergy
in itself - by removing the "tools" needed for a decent discussion
(filtering, offline reading, threading, archival, etc.), you're restricting
a large portion of a knowledgeable audience who can't exert the extra time.

-- 
Morbus Iff ( united we're bland )
Culture: http://www.disobey.com/ and http://www.gamegrene.com/
Tech: http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/au/779 - articles and weblog
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