Archive of UserLand's first discussion group, started October 5, 1998.
Re: UserLand's response
Author: Carmen Posted: 6/17/1999; 8:40:59 AM Topic: Netscape on next rev of RSS Msg #: 7509 (In response to 7507) Prev/Next: 7508 / 7510
Well, as the developer of a desktop app which "reads the stuff*", I certainly hope that we can come to a clean solution here. It's not really hard to support multiple formats (I am already handling RSS, scriptingNews, and ultraMode). But I would prefer not to have to support six or eight distinct formats. I'd rather work on cool features that add real value.I'm not sure that "market muscle" is what it takes to make a format stick. In this case I believe that it will be tools, content, and applications, but not equally weighted. I'd give more importance to content. If we want to change the world from today's unstructured HTML mess into something which is clean, organized, and structured for automatic processing then we need lots of good content. To me this means we should keep the format clean and simple.
A bunch of sites syndicate their content as POTF (plain old text files :-) right now. These are often weblog/hobby/3-guys-in-a-garage sites. They are going to move to XML syndication if it is easy to do and an incremental step. DTDs are abstract, scary things to most people. We need a format that is simple enough to let people clone an existing file and insert their own stuff into some obvious "slots."
That's my 2 cents.
Carmen
* - Headline Viewer - http://www.vertexdev.com/HeadlineViewer
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