A little RSS bright spot
Amidst all the backbiting, frontbiting, bile-spewing nonsense surrounding RSS these days, I’m inordinately pleased to see that dates in RSS 2.0 “conform to the Date and Time Specification of RFC 822, with the exception that the year may be expressed with two characters or four characters (four preferred).” Why? Because it was my minor quibble. Do I have any political motive for posting this? You decide. Frankly, if RSS wasn’t so useful to me, I’d delete all my feeds and every post where I’ve ever mentioned it. If anyone thinks that making the RSS community look like a cross between an episode of Cops and your worst memories of junior high school will somehow help the format, they’ve got another think coming.
It is rather sad with the all stuff going on over RSS, whether it’s to RDF or not to RDF, or the version swapping, or the puerile playground atmosphere built up around the developers’ vitriol they aim at each other.
It feels like Thanksgiving with my family; but without the meal.
My opinion — RSS had basically been stuck at 0.91, with all discussion going on to try to make 1.0 work, when we should have been, as a group, been working on incremental improvements that are user-driven, and enable new capabilities in aggregators and tools. There was no need to waste so much time and energy discussing the things we have been discussing, and certainly no reason to have the highly moral and personal discussions. They should have all been off topic, and there should have been no support for people who wanted to make it personal. It never was (and is not).
It’s baffling to me. I can’t comprehend the inability to separate something produced by one person from that person, I can’t comprehend deifying group process, and I sure as hell can’t comprehend completely failing to do anything about encouraging developers to support the features in a spec.
Aaron first proposed the RSS 1.0 content module (at that point the weblogs module) in the third message on RSS-DEV. More than two years and nearly 4000 messages later, I know of exactly one RSS reader that actually supports his current abbreviated syntax (and several that have trouble with the version that hides HTML in a CDATA section). Building the future is an admirable goal, but with no thought of building the present it’s all just castles in the air.