The RSS-Atom Schism

The same philosophy dictates an end to the disagreement over RSS. If they want respect for the formats and protocols they implement, they must do RSS exactly as UserLand does. The thing that Blogger and MT currently call RSS is not only not what UserLand does but it isn’t even an improvement over what UserLand does. Lose-lose. - Dave Winer

My support is, unsurprisingly, also partly based on politics. The recent flap about “funky RSS” just highlights the ongoing political quagmire of weblog tech, and the importance of having an open format that is not controlled by a single vendor. Vendor neutrality is particularly important now, as weblogs break into the mainstream. Weblogging is becoming its own industry, one where interoperability can no longer be solved simply by calling up a friend or dashing off a quick email. And one where no one needs to tolerate the sort of FUD we’ve seen in the past few weeks. - Mark Pilgrim

Tim Jarrett explains, eloquently, why anyone who uses weblogs and aggregators should be angry as hell when developers try to rip up the pavement, break everything and start over, just when it’s all working so well. The weblog story isn’t about technology anymore, it’s about writers and readers. As I read Tim’s piece I kept thinking, finally, someone has the guts to say it. Bravo Tim. Where do I sign? - Dave Winer

Evan: can you explain, in layman’s terms, why you support Atom and not RSS? What’s better about it? Sell me on it. So far I have not yet been sold on why Atom is better (other than it’s controlled by a different group of people who control RSS). - Robert Scoble

IMHO, the most practical path out of this mess is for the Atom initiative to hi-jack RSS 2.0 and build on it without breaking backward compatibility. A new spec will obviously have to be written to avoid copyright problems with Dave’s version of the RSS 2.0 spec, but people were complaining about the old spec anyway. - Don Park

Don Park suggests that Blogger and Movable Type adopt RSS 2.0. I’ve been asking them to do this for a long time, repeatedly, and ask once again. Don casts the RSS 2.0 spec as an immovable object in the way of something, but we went to great lengths to make sure that it wasn’t in the way. It’s licensed under the Creative Commons for-attribution license. So all you have to do, if you want to produce a derivative work, is credit me with authorship of the original. Period. End of obligation. And if you don’t want to use my spec as the basis for yours, your obligation to me is zero, nada, nil, void. How much less of an obstacle could it be? Don suggests “backward compatible.” I like the sound of that. - Dave Winer

Dave Winer suggests that Don Park wants MT to adopt RSS 2.0 Note that Don Park says no such thing about MT. - Richard Eriksson

I wonder what would happen if Atom were to incorporate RSS 2.0, and Google, Six Apart, and Userland products all began producing products that supported Atom and then Dave were to notice that Blogger and MT produced an Atom feed somewhat different than one from Radio? Would he write, “If they want respect for the formats and protocols they implement, they must do Atom exactly as UserLand does.”

Atom is based on RSS in exactly the same sense that RSS is based on protocols that came before it. Attribution will be specifically given to Netscape, UserLand, and the RSS-DEV working group. - Sam Ruby

And while the progress of Atom has been slow, I think it is fair to say that the SSF-DEV group hasn’t been working at lightning speed, either. But there are signs of progress.

Links in this entry:

Post a comment

TrackBack URL for this entry:

November 2004
October 2004
September 2004
August 2004
July 2004
June 2004
May 2004
April 2004
March 2004
February 2004
January 2004
December 2003
November 2003
October 2003
September 2003
August 2003
July 2003
June 2003
May 2003
April 2003

The RSS-Atom Schism

An enblogment for Kerry

This page which contains an entry consisting of 678 words and 10 paragraphs was generated in 88.43 seconds.