Bad for RSS, Good for Atom?
Apple’s recent jump onto the podcasting bandwagon has drawn fire from Dave Winer, the patriarch of RSS. Winer’s beef is that Apple has modded-up the RSS 2.0 spec to include some proprietary name spacing (e.g. itunes:foo) and tossed in some seemingly-unwarranted tag duplication as well.
Coming on the heels of Microsoft’s mods to RSS, these announcements feel like an unwelcome resurrection of the RSS wars, where multiple variants of the RSS spec has made parsing syndicated feeds a serious pain in the reader.
This also demonstrates the double-edged sword of XML file formats: Anybody with a text editor can screw with the format, no matter how carefully it was planned out.
I’ve long been an advocate of XML for lots of things, but this brand of nonsense nearly makes me wish all file formats were still binary, and thus not-casually-mucked-with. Can you imagine the chaos if companies like Apple and Microsoft just decided to toss a few extra bits into their own proprietary JPEG or PNG files? (Editors note: further ranting deleted for the sake of our sensitive readers.)
Open source software makes sense. Open source file formats, if RSS is any indication, are a complete disaster. Which brings me back to the title of this rant post: These unwelcome forks (yes, I mean forks) of RSS are proving to be welcome ammunition for the Atom evangelists. The Atom specification may be slow out of the gate, but at least it is deliberate, thoughtful, and to borrow a phrase, participated in by consenting adults. Once the Atom 1.0 spec is released and stable, will anyone want to deal with the RSS mess any more?
July 7th, 2005 at 21:22
Funny coming from Whiner^H^H^H^H^H^Heiner who forked RSS from the more extensible and flexible RDF-based spec in the first place.
At any rate, Apple, Microsoft or a tribe of chimpanzees can stick in whatever namespaces they want into an RSS file. Hell, the widely accepted Dublin Core schema has duplication with RSS, but it certainly hasn’t hurt anything. If anything, RSS2 is simply a basis.
The Atom spec is never going to take off because Tim Bray and the 6 Apart people want to treat it as a whole CMS API and they have over specialized it to apply only to blogs. The reason Microsoft is looking at RSS is because it really is just flexible enough to used for a lot of “free form” messaging between apps, and still maintain that baseline. Of course, it had all this AND mappability and easy data analytics when we were using RSS-RDF, but…
Sorry, I really can stand Weiner. His sense of personal grandeur rivals Stallman, only he has 1/10,000th the actual knowledge and technical ability.