RE: [syndication] Top 10 Reasons Why RSS Rules

["Danny Ayers" <danny666@virgilio.it>]

Congratulations on building the Atom support, but I am a little puzzled by
some of your statements.

> Yeah, it kinda sucks that we had to spend considerable development
> effort to support Atom, a new format for which I'm still not convinced
> is needed. And Atom is *considerably* more difficult to implement on the
> aggregator side than any of the previous formats, especially when adding
> support to an existing parser of the other formats.

A question - on what do base this? In what respects is Atom any more
difficult than RSS 1.0/ or 2.0? My own experiments suggest that it will be
easier, as there is less likely to be the variety found between the RSS
dialects, and the expected treatment of markup is better defined (better
than the Userland dialects anyway).

An observation - Atom isn't yet finished. If development effort is at such a
premium, you could wait until it was finished and waste less time.

 But there's going to
> be a decent percentage of the market that's only going to be syndicated
> in Atom format, so we're obligated to our users to support it.

Not in the immediate future, but longer term I imagine this will be the
case.

> I personally never had a problem with any of the so-called 'ambiguities'
> or issues with the existing formats. Maybe that's because my background
> is in email, where the specs have always been baroque, somewhat
> incomplete, and written after the fact. Despite all that email seems to
> work ok. And maybe that explains why, to me, the reasons stated for Atom
> being better than the existing formats, don't seem that important.

The ambiguities haven't been so much of a problem for me, but only because I
filter everything down. Anything outside of core RSS 2.0 gets ignored (any
valid RDF gets accepted).

> The only thing I can think of that I'd like to see enforced is no HTML
> in titles. We make titles into links, and putting HTML in there tends to
> make things a bit ugly. Other than that, stick with what currently
> works. And if you have any specific questions, feel free to ask.
>
> I very much appreciate your attitude of wanting to work with us
> aggregator providers. The world of syndication needs more cooperation.
> And donuts. ;-)

Indeed.

Cheers,
Danny.