Decoding Dave Winer

Authored by Michael Pate on June 15th, 2003 at 12:22 PM

Dave finally tried to explain what he meant by his cryptic comments. The Movable Type community attempted to reverse-engineer his comments and (with the help of a member of the RSS developer community) respond. Now Dave, rather than acknowledge the efforts made, has launched another attack:

When Blogger and MT reinvented RSS, and had the audacity to call it RSS (man that is nasty), you gotta wonder why they did it. I don’t know. The only reason that makes sense to me is that they want to keep data interchange a dark art, understood only by a few, and widely considered impossible. That’s probably not the reason. As some wise man once said, never attribute to malice that which can be explained by incompetence. Either way, it’s bad. - Dave Winer

Addendum(June 17): Since Dave thought I should add another quote, I located this one:

Independent sites are more plentiful, more engagingly written, more skillfully designed and more widely visited than ever before. The community is inundated with transformative new applications and Web services, many of them open source apps built with XML-based markup languages like RSS, RDF and SOAP, i.e., with Web standards. Web-savvy commercial products like Blogger and Movable Type are doing great. Usage is still growing, although nowhere near as exponentially as it did in the 1990s. Technologically and creatively, the Web is as exciting as ever. - Jeffrey Zeldman

Links in this entry:

A Conversation With Jeffrey Zeldman
Don Quixote
Funky RSS?
RSS Standards
Why I said Movable Type's RSS support is funky

Comments

Just wanted to point out that I'm not part of the MT community. I'm part of the confused RSS developer community :)

It's not up to me to fix Movable Type. Your comments and/or bug reports should be addressed to the authors of the product. Seriously.

Also, there's no reason to quote one paragraph from my post without posting the others? Or better yet, why not just point to it. When you take just that one paragraph people might miss the context, and the conclusion. Pointing, imho, is the web-way of doing things. Thanks.

: Pointing, imho, is the web-way of doing things.

You failed to put a permalink into the beginning of that paragraph. Pointing was impossible.

Not to mention that Dave has never been afraid to change his archives to make himself look better, so pointing to it on his site is unfortunately not a realistic option.

The author here did point to the larger context, so Dave doesn't really have a complaint except that the quote makes him look bad, which really is not a surprise. Dave, if you have a problem with Moveable Type, why don't you follow your own advice and submit a bug report instead of blasting them in public?

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