Re: [syndication] Comments and questions

[Ben Hammersley <ben@benhammersley.com>]

On Tuesday, Sep 3, 2002, at 19:01 Europe/London, Dave Winer wrote:

> No Morbus in other words, if you want to do some work, let's do it.
>
> Dave

and to start us off, | refer the learned gentleman to Julian Bond's 
original message of this morning. All of which is good, and worthy of a 
response here. Over to you, Dave...

From: Julian Bond <julian_bond@voidstar.com>
Date: Tue Sep 3, 2002  08:48:34 Europe/London
To: syndication@yahoogroups.com
Subject: [syndication] RSS 0.94
Reply-To: syndication@yahoogroups.com

I find it extraordinarily sad that the RSS 0.94 development effort is
happening across multiple weblogs and multiple comment threads and not
here. So having got that off my chest, here's my two pennyworth.

I'd like to see:-

- The 0.94 spec re-written in the style of the early RFCs, like rfc822
for instance. These are models of clear, concise, accurate text that
would be worth emulating.

- A deliberate effort to remove all ambiguity. There are a number of
places in the proposed spec where language is used that is very open to
interpretation. For instance, my favourite; "<link> is the URL of the
story." in the <item> description.

- Notes on elements that are deprecated even though they are left in for
compatibility.

- A more complete sample and sample snippets that illustrate the use of
every element.

- Some commentary on common usage.

- The removal of the restriction on using link types other than http and
ftp. In particular, I can't see any good reason for banning https and I
can think of (fairly bizarre!) applications where news and mailto would
be handy.

- A <category> tag on channel that is similar to <item><category>

- A DTD and a set of recommendations of how to reference the DTD that
can handle foreign character sets without breaking validating parsers.

- A note deprecating the use of entity-encoded html in any element
except <item><description>

And finally, and somewhat contentiously,

- The removal of the copyright notice. I cannot think of any good reason
for a corporate copyright disclaimer on a standards specification.