We all know that Dave Winer has ruined RSS. So now it is time to move on.
The Project aims to replace RSS with something that is technically superior, easier to use, and not controlled by Winer. All are, in my opinion, necessary.
Slash will happily support this when it is done and the tools are available. Well, Slash won't happily do anything, let alone support this, but I will happily add support for this to Slash. It's still sorta early in the process, and I am too busy to participate, but I trust the people involved, and I am very optimistic about it. Fight the bad, support the good, and save the world!
I like the 0.9x format. It was easy and it did its job well. However, I'd love to see The Project define a discover method for the syndication feeds that do NOT involve WSDL or anything that beastly. Hell, I'd be happy if they register a TPC port just for this service. So that if I went to port 9009, and typed "gimme", I'd get the feed. I can imagine an aggregator service that catalogs feeds for other programs to search through. Of course all this infrastruct will eat itself. Maybe one could set up a DNS like distributed DB of feed sources? That would be coolio.
RSS should have been decoupled from its inventor early on. The same could also be said for Java for nearly identical reasons.
Re:too bad, early RSS was great
pudge on 2003-08-04T20:43:32
RSS should have been decoupled from its inventor early on.
Despite what Winer had led people to believe, he is not the inventor of RSS, Netscape is. He modified it to become RSS 0.9x (after RSS 0.9), changed the name two or three times, and then modified it and other things to become RSS 2.0 (something he initially offered as a joke, when he said he was retiring from RSS development, a year before he released RSS 2.0... and oh, that this sort of thing could be fiction ...). A separate RSS development group "invented" RSS 1.0, which is significantly superior IMO to all the RSS 0.9x versions, as well as RSS 2.0, but still has its own problems that I hope this new project will address (mostly having to do with complexity, usability ... things RSS 2.0 never improved upon in the slightest bit, despite this being Dave's primary point of concern about it in the first place). Re:too bad, early RSS was great
jhi on 2003-08-05T11:46:09
Whiner has this strange habit of freezing immature and unclear specs: witness XML-RPC for another.
