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.

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.