Big Dog's side of the story

About: Tinfinger: Dave Winer's right. There, I said it.

An open note to Rogers Cadenhead

Rogers, I need to get out of the RSS morass, and back to work on new stuff. Could you make your group less of a threat to harmony in RSS-land? Be a sport and listen a little, give a little. You can make a contribution without being Lord Master God of RSS. (I don't want to be that either, I just want to be a friend of RSS and be respected for having played a major role in creating it, and having a pretty good idea about what it is and isn't.)

Here's the compromise I propose. Change the name and charter of the group you've started. Decide whether you're working on a profile or a new format. You can't do what you're doing and call it RSS, that totally breaks the roadmap, and I won't stand by and let that happen. That's the committment I made to the people who implemented RSS, that I would stand with them and protect the roadmap. So as long as you're in conflict with the roadmap, we're in conflict. And I'm not going to argue with you about whether or not you're in conflict, since I'm the author of the roadmap, I reserve that judgement for myself. Someone has to have the last word, and when it comes to the RSS 2.0 roadmap, that's me, not you.

You've said you're concerned because Microsoft is making a strong move into RSS. That's a concern I share, so that's common ground. You've even found reasons to be concerned, things they've done that we need to talk about with them. So define your group on those lines, you're a study group, or a documentation project, or you're designing a tight profile of RSS that's intended to maximize interop, these are things I can support. I hope you see now that my support is worth something, that you can't just blow by me in RSS, and ignore what I say, that that just isn't going to work.

And here is the view from the wizzard

...

It's is all in the tone of what they are doing and the language. They should call it a Best Practices Document, not a clarification of the spec. So that substantually they are doing the same thing, but they are providing the development community what it really needs. Here is a tangeable example of the kind of wording that should appear in the document ...

source: A. Pagaltzis

For a feed producer who wants her feed to work everywhere, it
   is not advisable that it contain more than one enclosure per
   item. If she puts in more, many aggregators will not process
   the feed as intended.

For an aggregator developer who wants to support all feeds in
   the wild, it is advisable to support multiple enclosures. If he
   does not support multiple enclosures, his aggregator will fail
   to process some feeds as intended.

...

Comments

Seth says
More growling by Big Dog url http://groups.yahoo.com/group/rss-public/message/357

Big Dog's side of the story

About: Tinfinger: Dave Winer's right. There, I said it.

An open note to Rogers Cadenhead

Tags

Comments

See Also