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

Re: Want to tell the list?

Author:Chuck Shotton
Posted:9/5/2000; 1:25:28 PM
Topic:scriptingNews outline for 9/2/2000
Msg #:20883 (In response to 20880)
Prev/Next:20882 / 20884

The issue surrounds technical direction. The question is more like "When a handful of developers disagree, by what right does one group claim to set the direction." In this case, right or wrong, it seems like a simple majority was their thinking.

The flaw in that logic is what constitutes a majority. Sure, some of the original people that created RSS out of a vacuum many months ago were in on the current decision making process. But 100% of the 10 people in that vacuum is a drop in the bucket compared to the tens of thousands of content sites that now depend on RSS as a mechanism for distributing their content.

At this point, jacking around with a standard that large warrants nothing less than a full-blown documentation of the 0.91 spec as a reference document, authoring a 1.0 spec as a draft RFC, and then establising a formal working group to hammer out the details. Convening in a semi-private mailing list to thrash out a fait accompli amongst a handful of developers is extremely inappropriate at this point, regardless of the pedigree of those involved.

And while we're lobbing hand grenades, I don't believe all of the people currently involved are sufficiently well-versed in the needs of the RSS installed base to be making these decisions. Period. Sure, there are some people whose content sites derive value from producing or consuming RSS. There are some companies involved that have some vested interest in controlling the standard. But I want to know where the content creators are in this discussion. It's THEIR standard, first and foremost.

That some propeller-heads are altruistically interested in making the poor, dumb content providers' lives easier is quite noble, but ultimately misdirected. The need for name space additions to RSS is zero, in my opinion. If you want to craft some byzantine, extensible standard for machine representations of syndicated content, please feel free to do so. But don't hijack the original intent of RSS by making it something too complicated to be created by hand or parsed by something less than a full-blown, validating XML parser with DTD support. You're just going to kill it as a viable standard because people will be unable to support it.

There are responses to this message:

This page was archived on 6/13/2001; 4:56:32 PM.

© Copyright 1998-2001 UserLand Software, Inc.