Catch up on stories from the past week (and beyond) at the Slashdot story archive

 


Forgot your password?
Close
typodupeerror
×
The Internet

RSS Version 3 Specs Up for Review 147

Posted by CmdrTaco from the we'll-be-supporting-atom-in-a-few-weeks dept.
Jonathan Avidan writes "The RSS 3 Homepage now offers its first publicly available specification, the RSS 3 Lite-type Specification First Draft, intended for review and commenting for revision. RSS 3 is a reworking of RSS 2.0, filling the gaps and removing unnecessary features and is fully backwards-compatible, rather than a new format."
This discussion has been archived. No new comments can be posted.

RSS Version 3 Specs Up for Review More

RSS Version 3 Specs Up for Review

Comments Filter:

  • Unnecessary features (Score:5, Insightful)

    by kevin_conaway ( 585204 ) on Thursday August 18, 2005 @11:23AM (#13347868) Homepage
    How does one remove features and still remain backwards compatible?
    • By Embracing and Extending!

      *ducks*

    • Re:Unnecessary features (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 18, 2005 @11:33AM (#13347958)
      You remove features for which support was optional. Old implementations should discover that you're not using the options, new implementations no longer even check for them.

      • Re:Unnecessary features (Score:2, Insightful)

        by fm6 ( 162816 )
        The fact remains, software that relies on these features will cease to work. It may well be that RSS 3 is sufficiently backward compatible to support 99% of the software out there. That's still not the same thing as fully backward compatible.
        • If software is relying on optional features in order to work, the software is buggy and it's not the job of the protocol to support buggy implementations. There are two types of RSS software; publishing software and reader software. The publishing software is either going to use RSS 1,2, or 3 and should be to spec on whatever version it's publishing. Reader software should be able to read _at least_ the basic forms of RSS 1 and 2, in which case it will have no problem reading RSS 3.
          • um.... just because the reader software can read version 1 and 2, that doesn't imply that it can read ANY version 3 feeds, especially if the publishing software took advantage of features only available in version 3.

            so i write a publishing feature and write a reader feature.... how can people think it is "insightful" to assume that this reader feature just magically propegates? donkeys.

          • If software is relying on optional features in order to work, the software is buggy

            Is it, necessarily?

            Generally, it seems possible for software to exercise optional features and provide useful functionality, that works on a day-to-day basis.

            That isn't buggy.

            The real problem seems to be that software using optional features is fragile to future changes in the interface spec, or, if that particular application becomes popular, can cause the interface specification to grow complicated, to the point where i

    • The Standard should strive to remain as backwards compatible as possible with the RSS 2.0 standard

      There is quite a big difference between striving to provide backwards compatibility, and actually obtaining it.
      • Oh, sorry. Can you point out where is this particular line so I'll edit "should" to "must"?
        Actually, I think I'll re-edit the entire line. It should not "strive" but rather "be" backward compatible, as it already is.

        • Re:Unnecessary features (Score:2, Informative)

          by hritcu ( 871613 )
          The RSS 3 Requirements Page: General RSS 3 Requirements [rss3.org]:
          6. The Standard should strive to remain as backwards compatible as possible with the RSS 2.0 standard
        • How can it be backwards compatible when it alters and removes existing features?:

          1.A list of alterations of the RSS 2.0.1 format:
          1. There must be at least one channel containing at least one item in any RSS document
          2. The RSS document MIME type is "application/rss+xml"
          3. The content of the <language> element is now not specified by the W3C or Netscape documents but rather a compilation according to the RFC1766 (using the ISO639 required
    • Clever Marketing

  • durnit (Score:4, Funny)

    by B3ryllium ( 571199 ) on Thursday August 18, 2005 @11:25AM (#13347878) Homepage
    Damn, and I *just* got around to implementing RSS1 in my CMS ... ah well. :)

  • While we're on the subject... (Score:4, Interesting)

    by gowen ( 141411 ) <gwowen@gmail.com> on Thursday August 18, 2005 @11:26AM (#13347890) Homepage Journal
    ... plans are afoot for Microsoft to co-opt RSS and rename it "web feeds" [theregister.co.uk][from El Reg, so take it with a pinch of snuff]. Now, that is a better name, but it wouldn't be the first time that some incompatible variations got added to an open standard during this process (*cough* Kerberos).

    • Re:While we're on the subject... (Score:4, Funny)

      by Trigun ( 685027 ) <evil@evil e m p i r e . a t h .cx> on Thursday August 18, 2005 @11:32AM (#13347952)
      It'll be an application octet/stream with a signed key that you need to decrypt it. They key will be available in the new Microsoft Web feeds viewer only, or on hacker sites two days before official launch. The actual feed will be the equivalent of `cat /dev/mem > newsfeed.web`, and subscribing to more than one feed will require a separate high speed connection installed on your computer.
    • "Web feeds?" Are those flies or spiders?

    • Re:While we're on the subject... (Score:2, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward
      ... plans are afoot for Microsoft to co-opt RSS and rename it "web feeds".

      Huh?

      They're choosing "web feeds" as the user interface text to mean RSS, Atom et al. The article says nothing about them modifying the feed schema.
    • So what? The RSS guys managed to release several incompatible versions, and this even without Microsoft's help.

    • Re:While we're on the subject... (Score:4, Interesting)

      by Zeinfeld ( 263942 ) on Thursday August 18, 2005 @11:55AM (#13348132) Homepage
      ... plans are afoot for Microsoft to co-opt RSS and rename it "web feeds"

      That is more likely to be based on the IETF ATOM standard though than RSS 3.0. But it really does not matter which one Microsoft picks, just that they pick one and only one. Google made a good choice when they went with ATOM.

      RSS is a mess, it became a mess because people refused to go to a standards forum and the result was a whole slew of incompatible ad-hoc extensions. There should be one syndication format and that should be a standard maintained by W3C or IETF.

      Renaming RSS Web feeds makes a lot of sense, just as renaming the 802.11b WiFi made sense. RSS is underspecified and fragmented, just like 802.11b was. The point of WiFi was you knew stuff would work together. So renaming RSS Web Feeds makes a great deal of sense.

    • Why wouldn't they just dust off their "push" standard and try pushing it on us again?
    • ... plans are afoot for Microsoft to co-opt RSS and rename it "web feeds"

      Give me a break. That's like saying that they've co-opted HTML and renamed it "web pages". It doesn't often make sense to refer to features by their underlying protocols / file formats. I suppose you SMTP your friends rather than e-mailing them?

      This especially makes sense here, since web feeds will not only use RSS but also Atom.

    • plans are afoot for Microsoft to co-opt RSS and rename it "web feeds"[from El Reg, so take it with a pinch of snuff].
      Eh. That link [theregister.co.uk] even suggests that IE 7b1 supports RSS 9.x

      Yes, definitely to be taken with a pinch of snuff. Or at least with an eye for interesting typos :)

    • plans are afoot for Microsoft to co-opt RSS and rename it "web feeds"[from El Reg, so take it with a pinch of snuff]

      It is a better name, but Microsoft sure didn't come up with it; people in usability have been recommending the "feed" name for quite some time now in order to make feeds more accessible to the general public. The reasoning, of course, is the same as in calling your browser a "web browser" and not an "HTML/XHTML viewer".

  • Yay, XHTML in RSS (Score:5, Informative)

    by Gopal.V ( 532678 ) on Thursday August 18, 2005 @11:29AM (#13347914) Homepage Journal
    They removed

    <clouds>
    <skipHours>
    <skipDays>
    <textInput>
    <source> element
    <pics> element
    <guid> element's optional "isPemraLink" attribute

    And added

    The <comments> element's optional "type" attribute
    The <pubDate> element's optional "type" attribute
    The <ttl> element's optional "span" attribute

    Looks like good news for bloggers and God knows what for stuff like GeoRSS or BlogTorrents :)

    I've been waiting for that a long time now
    • Agreed. As a web developer, who created a hosted RSS reader (for the PHP5 developer contest), the current implementation of RSS was maddening.

      I mean, it's fairly obvious from what they removed that the specification was never terribly well thought-out in the first place, so this can only help. Oh, and incidentally - I was going to chastize your spelling on "isPemraLink" - only to find that that's how it's spelled in the article. Who knew that the original specification was so flawed ;-)
    • I'm in favour of most of the changes as well, it seems to have stripped out most of the redundant features and added some neccesary, and needed ones. I am still a little concerned that RSS does not become too 'feature rich', there is a reason it is called RSS.

  • Gzip RSS (Score:2, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Why isn't gzip compression of RSS feeds part of the specification? I'd have thought it'd be a natural thing to include for a format designed for minimizing bandwidth usage.

    • Re:Gzip RSS (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Bogtha ( 906264 ) on Thursday August 18, 2005 @11:33AM (#13347957)

      Why isn't gzip compression of RSS feeds part of the specification?

      It is. It's part of the HTTP specification, RFC 2616 [ietf.org]. Every data format transmitted over HTTP can take advantage of it. There's no need to treat RSS as a special case.

    • Wouldn't bzip2 do an even better job.
      It can read the whole document and notice
      that <item> occurs alot and replace it with one bit.

      • Re:Gzip RSS (Score:1, Informative)

        by Anonymous Coward
        It can read the whole document and notice
        that occurs alot and replace it with one bit.

        Uh, no it can't. bzip2 uses

        - run length encoding
        - move-to-front buffering
        - the Burrows-Wheeler block transform (sorts the data in a reversible way; the output is usually more compressible)
        - run length encoding (again)
        - huffman encoding

        There's no searching for repeated sequences beyond the BW transform. You're not going to replace a common sequence with a single bit.

  • blech, versioning quagmire in feed formats. who needs the hassle? just use Atom 1.0 [feedvalidator.org] from IETF, no less.

  • An implementing client should support everything (Score:3, Insightful)

    by hritcu ( 871613 ) on Thursday August 18, 2005 @11:31AM (#13347941) Homepage
    Also worth mentioning is that the Atom syndication standard, currently in development, is out of this standard's scope and does not concern it. Due to contradiction in structure, the standards cannot rely on one another, yet an implementing client should support both standards.

    How about all five RSS 0.92, RSS 1.0, RSS 2.0, RSS 3.0 and of course ATOM. This will be really a joy for implementers.

  • Is it an accident.... (Score:5, Interesting)

    by hta ( 7593 ) on Thursday August 18, 2005 @11:37AM (#13347992) Homepage Journal
    that this happens on the day after the IETF announces that it's approved the ATOM syndication format?

    Announcement reproduced below:

    The IESG has approved the following document:

    - 'The Atom Syndication Format' as a Proposed Standard

    This document is the product of the Atom Publishing Format and Protocol Working Group.

    The IESG contact persons are Scott Hollenbeck and Ted Hardie.

    A URL of this Internet-Draft is:
    http://www.ietf.org/internet-drafts/draft-ietf-ato mpub-format-11.txt [ietf.org]

    Technical Summary:

    This document describes the Atom format for syndication. It is XML-based and is considered to be the successor to the earlier RSS formats. Its primary use is for web-based content, but is expected to be used for non-web content as well, such as personal news feeds.

    Working Group Summary:

    Some members of the working group remain unenthusiastic about some sections of the document, but the chairs strongly believe that there is rough (or better) consensus in support of the document as a whole.
    For some of the parts with the most contention, there cannot be more than very rough consensus due to basic differences in the way people would design parts of the format, particularly given that we have many models in existence with the different flavors of RSS. For some parts of the document, there is contention about whether or not a particular item should or should not be in the Atom core versus being an extension. For some parts, there is contention whether there should be MUST/SHOULD/MAY leeway for content creators in the presence or absence of an element, or the semantic content of an element; the
    group really pushed RFC 2119 around during the past few months.

    Protocol Quality

    Scott Hollenbeck and the XML Directorate have reviewed the specification for the IESG. Test implementations have confirmed basic protocol soundness.
    • The thing about RSS is, anyone can decide to make the next version. I doubt Dave had anything to do with this.

      Besides, RSS 3.0 is already taken:
      http://www.aaronsw.com/2002/rss30 [aaronsw.com]

      Robert Sayre
    • I'll swear in court if necessary (though if necessary, then we've gone too far, haven't we?) that I had no idea the IETF approved Atom until reading the comments here. It was published today because it got finished today, simple as that.

      • Re:Complete accident (Score:3, Interesting)

        by Bogtha ( 906264 )

        So basically, you'd swear, under penalty of perjury, that you were completely unaware of a development of major significance for your #1 competitor, that's been pending for months?

        If that's not true, then you are dishonest. If it is true, then you are out of touch with the communiity that you claim to serve. Either way, it's not good.

        And what's up with this? [rss3.org]

        Once the requirements page is set, the creation of the standard, complying to the Requirements stated below, will start with producing the

  • Sorry Jonathan, but... (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 18, 2005 @11:37AM (#13347994)
    RSS 2 was the one whose development "contradicts all other standards", not RSS 1.0 as you would claim.

    Between that and Dave Winer's sheer craziness (and the craziness of those like you who drank too much of Dave's cool-aid), the future lies in the open standard called Atom, not in RSS 2 or RSS 3.

    Heck, at this point even RSS 1.0 has a far better chance of success than RSS 2, with more and more people picking it as a base for extensible microformats after realizing that RSS 1.0 got a lot of things right years before most people even realized why they were needed.

  • Why? (Score:1)

    by hritcu ( 871613 )
    Why on earth would we need another (fourth) RSS version?

  • How about a "Next"/"Back" option (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 18, 2005 @11:40AM (#13348024)
    Since a lot of search engines are starting to provide results in RSS, why not a "Next", "Back" option? It seems rather useless to be able to get only five results in my favorite aggregator, and I would love to be able to go "forward" within a certain result set. This might also work for sites that provide news stories as well, such as Slashdot, in terms of getting older articles from the past week or two.

  • Awful, awful idea (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Bogtha ( 906264 ) on Thursday August 18, 2005 @11:42AM (#13348032)

    I get the feeling that this is a practical joke/troll by Jonathan Avidan - the person who is editing this new specification, the person who maintains the website linked to, and who submitted this article to Slashdot.

    Yeah, the RSS 2 specification could do with cleaning up and clarification. No, it's not feasible because of too many people doing stupid things like announcing new versions of RSS all on their own and fragmenting the community.

    From the FAQ: [rss3.org]

    Who designs the RSS Version 3 standard?

    Jonathan Avidan managers this site and edits the specifications according to common requests and open debates held in the Message Board and via email.

    Follow the link. It's a new message board with no posts.

    There is zero community behind this "standard", it's just a spec some guy decided to write of his own accord. In contrast, a real community effort, Atom, has just reached 1.0 and is standardized by the IETF. Nobody should take this "RSS 3.0" seriously.

    • Re:Awful, awful idea (Score:4, Interesting)

      by hritcu ( 871613 ) on Thursday August 18, 2005 @11:51AM (#13348109) Homepage
      For what purpose is the RSS Version 3 standard necessary? [rss3.org]

      The 0.9x class of standards is outdated and underdocumented. The 2.0 class is highly underdocumented, filled with unnecessary features though lacking others which could be useful. The RSS 3 standard is supposed to extensively document the standard, to expand where expansion is needed and to remove unnecessary features.

      Is any of you satisfied with the explanation that the world needs a new RSS standard because the other versions are not well documented? What on earth stops him (Jonathan Avidan) from documenting them properly?

      • Is any of you satisfied with the explanation that the world needs a new RSS standard because the other versions are not well documented?

        I did agree with that, a while ago. Then a group of people got together, created a new specification, that used a different name (as the RSS 2.0 specification suggests), worked with the community, put the specification through the IETF standardisation process, and the result is Atom 1.0.

        So the real question isn't "why don't you improve RSS 2.0?", the real question

    • I get the feeling that this is a practical joke/troll by Jonathan Avidan - the person who is editing this new specification, the person who maintains the website linked to, and who submitted this article to Slashdot.

      Agreed. It's highly unusual that no blogs [technorati.com] in the Technorati index (of apparently 15.4 million sites) link to it. If this was a real community effort, you would expect to find some discussion/rumours on the new "standard".

      Perhaps it's just somebody trying to irritate Dave Winer or somebody suffer

    • Re:Awful, awful idea (Score:3, Interesting)

      by CDarklock ( 869868 )
      I see nothing wrong with Jonathan making an honest effort to create a good standard, even if he is going it alone at the moment.

      Of course, his PHP mail() configuration is hosed. Yeah, I take it seriously when a guy writing RSS standards can't configure his server. Sure. Whatever. But it can happen to anyone, so I won't pass judgement on that alone.

      I read the standard, went to the forum, and pointed out some valid concerns about one of its sections.

      The response to those concerns will tell me just how serious
    • Nice job pointing that out. RSS already has a history of [wikipedia.org] forking so I was wondering which group did 3.0. Apparently someone independent. The previous forking was by an external party was not successful. RSS 3.0 will probably follow the same path to failure. I remember the Gnutella protocol also had an unsuccessful hijacking attempt of the name previously...

    • *Shrug*

      I'm writing the FeedTools library for Ruby. I took one look at his spec and came to the same conclusion you did. I shrugged because my parser can already read his spec without any changes to my code at all. I won't actually output anything into this format unless I see a good reason to, but in terms of parsing, it is effectively backwards compatible for parsers that are sufficiently liberal in what they accept. I haven't tried it, but I assume Mark Pilgrim's feedparser for Python would happily

    • Yeah, the RSS 2 specification could do with cleaning up and clarification. No, it's not feasible because of too many people doing stupid things like announcing new versions of RSS all on their own and fragmenting the community.

      As a matter of fact, I will shortly announce RSS 6.2. The Initial Private Community Draft will be released once I have pasted my name into the Atom specs.

  • But it already exists! [aaronsw.com]. Has for almost three years!

    • Re:rss3? (Score:3, Insightful)

      by atomm1024 ( 570507 )

      I'm glad you posted that.

      I realise that Aaron was probably joking, in order to make fun of Dave Winer, but still, the XML crap is totally pwn3d by his version of RSS 3.

      Seriously. Which of these is more compact and easy to read:

      <?xml version="1.0" encoding="ISO-8859-1"?>

      <rdf:RDF
      xmlns:rdf="ht tp://www.w3.org/1999/02/22-rdf-syntax-ns#"
      xmlns= "http://my.netscape.com/rdf/simple/0.9/">

      <chan nel>
      <title>Slashdot</title>
      <link>http://slashd ot.org/</link>
      <descript

      • Re:rss3? (Score:5, Insightful)

        by Bogtha ( 906264 ) on Thursday August 18, 2005 @01:10PM (#13348789)

        In fact, fuck XML altogether. The Internet got along just fine using custom text/binary based formats for three decades.

        Er, you do realise that XML is merely a simplified subset of SGML, on which HTML is based? Hard to agree that the Internet "got along just fine", when its killer app is based on something that is very similar to XML, only far more complicated

        But the tag-based syntax is optimised for specifying a tree-structured document and the attributes of text it contains.

        Sounds like RSS to me.

        • Er, you do realise that XML is merely a simplified subset of SGML, on which HTML is based?

          Yes.

          The meaning of "simplified" is questionable here, though. It's easier to parse and generate, but harder to read and write. Simplified for computers, but made more complex for humans.

          Hard to agree that the Internet "got along just fine", when its killer app is based on something that is very similar to XML, only far more complicated

          But the older versions of HTML were not in XML, so for all intents and pu

          • The meaning of "simplified" is questionable here, though. It's easier to parse and generate, but harder to read and write.

            I wouldn't say that. What does <p/test/ mean? And what will browsers do with it? With <input disabled>, what is the name of the attribute and what is its value?

            XML syntax is more regular. Yeah, closing all your elements explicitly might be tedious, but it's certainly simpler than remembering arcane rules like that.

            But the older versions of HTML were not in XML,

            • The point I was trying to make when I said that the Internet didn't need XML was that in recent years, people have been acting like XML is the solution to every problem. And that is not so. It doesn't matter if it has had a few good applications.

              Yes, it is. You have a feed with a number of entries branching from it, each of which have information branching from them - descriptions, dates, etc. That's a tree structure.

              It has a fixed depth. That's not a tree, or at least not a good use of a tree. With H

              • The point I was trying to make when I said that the Internet didn't need XML was that in recent years, people have been acting like XML is the solution to every problem. And that is not so.

                Now if you had said that, then I would have agreed with you. But you said something entirely different. Of course XML isn't a silver bullet. There is no silver bullet.

                I'm saying that your original statement, "fuck XML altogether. The Internet got along just fine using custom text/binary based formats for three

                • He's arguing that the data we store in RSS is not inherently a "tree" and that it gains nothing from being represented as a tree. The example that was given earlier showed what an RSS feed could look like if it was in something similar to RFC 2822 as opposed to XML. I don't see anything wrong with that.
      • Incidentally, the version of RSS you have there is 0.9, a dialect of RDF. It was not created by Dave Winer, and as far as I can know, he has never had any association with the RDF versions of RSS.
  • With Atom [atomenabled.org] all official and whatnot, why would anyone be working on RSS 3.0?

    Atom seems far superior to RSS 2.0 and much farther along than RSS 3.0.

    Is someone trying to give Dave Winer a heart attack?
    • Now he will have to come up with RSS 4.0...
    • I'm not sure what to make of RSS 3.0. Is it a blessed successor of Dave Winer's RSS 2.0, or is it a successor of the RDF-based RSS 1.0? Maybe it's yet a third RSS spec from someone unrelated to Winer or the RSS 1.0 people. Ugh. These syndication specs all do essentially the same damned thing, so it's just petty bickering over who's spec is whose and who gets to use the nomenclature "RSS".

      When I chose to implement syndication I went with Atom because of the bickering over RSS. Atom is far from perfect, but i
    • Is it a spec for a document, or a software application? All this talk of "posting new content into the feed"..

      http://www.atomenabled.org/developers/tutorials/ap i-quick-guide.php [atomenabled.org]

      Someone needs to write a simple RSS->Atom migration guide, leaving out all the content-management crappola.
  • Can't see the use of RSS3 when pretty common elements are stripped out.. couldn't find the enclosure element, which is kinda vital for podcasters. Not to mention other elements that have gone MIA. Lite and full?, whats next RSS diet tips?, c'mon, we got enough flavours of the day..

  • This RSS3 spec is starting to be no longer really simple. Are they going to drop the 'R'? If so I think I might have to side with Microsoft and Google and opt for a name change.
    • While they're at it, they should drop the first 'S' as well. It's no longer simple at all.
      I dunno, calling it 'S' just doesn't seem to work, somehow.

  • why? (Score:2, Interesting)

    by polaar ( 564379 )
    From the RSS 2 spec [harvard.edu]

    Roadmap

    RSS is by no means a perfect format, but it is very popular and widely supported. Having a settled spec is something RSS has needed for a long time. The purpose of this work is to help it become a unchanging thing, to foster growth in the market that is developing around it, and to clear the path for innovation in new syndication formats. Therefore, the RSS spec is, for all practical purposes, frozen at version 2.0.1. We anticipate possible 2.0.2 or 2.0.3 versions, etc. only fo

    • The author seems to just have found out that RSS 3.0 already exists :)

      The funniest thing, though, is that RSS 3 apparently exists,

      here [aaronsw.com]. I canvassed the web quite thoroughly, or so I thought, before starting this. I didn't find a thing. Well, luckily enough, that dialect of RSS has been around for 3 years and still no takers. And that's because it's an entirely new format, text based rather than XML based. (I wonder if I'll find this funny if the author demands that I change the name of this site...)

      A p

      • ... why that version of RSS 2.0 was created.

        Sorry - my mistake - should have been RSS 2.0 instead of 1.0. Though, it does not really matter, as it is a plain text, simplified down to absurd version of RSS. :)

  • What's with all of the "This section is normative", "That section is non-normative", "This section is informative" crap in the document?
  • Looked at the spec. quickly. Did not see any support for authentication. It would be useful to be able to provide a subscription service to selected users with some degree of security. Did I miss this in the spec. (or previous versions)? I admit I'm somewhat new to RSS.

    • Re:Authentication? (Score:4, Informative)

      by Bogtha ( 906264 ) on Thursday August 18, 2005 @12:36PM (#13348448)

      Looked at the spec. quickly. Did not see any support for authentication.

      You're looking at the wrong specification. RSS is transmitted over HTTP. HTTP provides authentication.

      It would be useful to be able to provide a subscription service to selected users with some degree of security.

      The thing preventing this is that common feed readers do not support enough of HTTP's features to be able to supply a username and password in a standard HTTP way.

      Like gzip compression, above, this isn't a problem that needs to be solved on a format-by-format basis. The transfer protocol handles it for all formats.

  • Who Are You? (Score:2, Interesting)

    by jeff_schiller ( 877821 )
    Wow you have put a lot of effort into this, but have you talked with anyone in the community? Why not participate in Atom discussions, why go off an implement yet another flavour of RSS. I call "practical joke" or lame attempt at getting "internet famous".
  • So I basically have to link this from here, maybe people will learn eventually.

    This whole mess is just not funny anymore.

    http://www.kuro5hin.org/story/2002/11/10/122820/97 [kuro5hin.org]
  • Will the refresh banning behavior still apply?
    • I like how he "thoroughly canvassed" the web to see if anyone else had created RSS 3, which apparently didn't include typing "RSS 3.0" into Google.

      What did he do, type in random URLs and see if anyone of them mentioned RSS 3?

      Troll or idiot, take your pick. Me, I'm working on RSS 4.0

      • You are right, he didn't search. Here are the first three results returned by Google [google.com]:
        1. http://www.aaronsw.com/2002/rss30
        2. http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/000574
        3. http://groups.yahoo.com/group/rss3/

        Yahoo [yahoo.com]:

        1. http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/000574
        2. http://www.aaronsw.com/2002/rss30
        3. http://diveintomark.org/archives/2004/02/04/inco mpatible-rss

        MSN [msn.com]:

        1. http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/000574
        2. http://www.aaronsw.com/2002/rss30
        3. http://www.rssbandit.org/
  • ...they can finally tell us what RSS really stands for.
  • To summarize things here: RSS 3 is only "official" to the one guy that modified the RSS 2 standard (which he doesn't control), itself not related to RSS 0.91 and 1.0, neither of which are controlled by the same people. Atom is the only thing remotely like a standard, and everybody hates it because of that. Aggregator authors don't give a flying fuck about any of them because they're doomed to support broken non-compliant implementations of all of them anyway.

    Basically, it's all a bunch of pointless dick-w
  • I have to wait 16 seconds now :(
  • Podcast blogospherirati! This development will undoubtly help podcasts take over radio.

Slashdot Top Deals

"When the going gets tough, the tough get empirical." -- Jon Carroll

Close