Archive of UserLand's first discussion group, started October 5, 1998.

ICEing RSS

Author:Dave Winer
Posted:3/19/1999; 9:14:18 AM
Topic:ICEing RSS
Msg #:4286
Prev/Next:4285 / 4287

I got an email this morning from Charlie Wood at Vignette:

If you haven't looked at it, here's the information on ICE:

http://www.vignette.com/CDA/Frameset/0,1031,S1-L1-Book-349,FF.html

It's more complex than RSS because it's a protocol, not just a DTD, but it's a W3C note and has the backing of Microsoft, Sun, News Corp, CNET, ZDNet, and a bunch of others. Vignette has a shipping product that speaks ICE. News Information Services has a reference implementation too.

My response

It's interesting that you send this to me now.

I spent a few hours with the initial public draft of the spec when it came out a few months ago. I thought it was horribly complicated.

We decided not to implement it at that time largely because it was so complicated, and also because we were not included in the design process for the protocol. You can't claim you didn't know were active in this area, because we did that pilot project early in 1998. I figured you guys wanted this as a proprietary advantage, not an auspicious beginning for something that was supposed to be an open protocol.

Further, RSS looks great to me, with just a little more icing on it, simple stuff based on XML-RPC it will be able to do everything ICE can do, without requiring a $50K tariff to Vignette.

If you guys are serious about working with us, we'll take another look, but you're going to have to stop trying to steer this industry unilaterally.

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