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use http://diveintomark.org/archives/2006/08/30/ipod-v ideo-howto
I have another excellent script but /. lamely blocks me from posting it and I can't find it on the net :(
Search for video_to_ipod_converter. Amarok will sync video fine to the ipod. Just make sure the title is encoded into the video.

Cheers
Ben

Our stances on whether XML's strictness is good or bad *for the web* is obviously different. I do think it's useful to be strict when handling strictly-formatted documents, as most XML documents are. HTML documents, beyond html, head and body tags, don't really have a strict structure to follow, just rules about how the tags will be nested, and therefore I think it's a really different situation. I will point to Mark Pilgrim's "Thought experiment" to explain my side, but I think it's a waste of our time to continue to debate this if your stance is set in stone. (As an aside, that article ended up converting John Gruber - the creator of Markdown, which you mentioned - to Pilgrim's side.)

There's also a philosophical side: *writing* HTML this far has been about firing up Notepad and a web browser. (Uploading and hosting is a different matter, but I'm talking about writing.) Requiring xmllint to write HTML isn't the web I want.

XHTML 1 is HTML 4 reformulated in XML syntax. By definition, it's backwards compatible. And no, I mean that HTML5's parsing is backwards compatible. Run a page, any HTML page, through an HTML5 tokenizer. HTML will come out right unless you are relying on browser-specific bugs, and there are allowances for XHTML void-tags with the / embedded. Google ran this tokenizer on a billion web pages to scrape them for attributes and tags. It works.

Regarding the XML 'noscript' point, the spec offers up this note: "All these contortions are required because, for historical reasons, the noscript element causes the HTML parser to act differently based on whether scripting is enabled or not. The element is not allowed in XML, because in XML the parser is not affected by such state, and thus the element would not have the desired effect." Does this mean you actually would like to be able to write invalid XML?

Whether you like it or not, DOM manipulation is being used in tandem with HTML, and it needs to be defined somewhere. The spec is actually called "Web Applications", and it describes HTML5 and, additionally, the DOM that should be used to manipulate it and that's used to store it internally. It's also important to remember that the spec is for browser implementors as well as authors! You need not be proficient in the parsing or tokenization or DOM manipulation of HTML5 to write in it, just as you don't need to be proficient in the meaning of uppercase 'SHOULD' or 'MAY' as defined in RFC2119 to be able to use XHTML. HTML5 itself is still a markup language, just as ever, but it's not just markup that needs to be defined in the spec.

At the end of the day, the browser vendors that care about standards sat down and said "this is getting messy, what do we need to codify?" and put it in the same spec with HTML5. CSS2 and CSS3 are well-defined. JavaScript is well-defined as ECMAScript. The font tag is deprecated and irrelevant and doesn't help your argument one whit.

I'm not being a troll, but the fact is, it takes nearly no time on Linux or OS X. Apple's current "Would you like to bring data over from another computer?" thingie that you see when first launching a new computer or new OS install really does work quite well. Linux, of course, is a matter of copying over your home directory. Apps are too dependant upon the use & user to go into detail on here.

As for Windows, I work with a close to default install. Might take 10 minutes to get all the things I want--
- unlock the taskbar
- classic start menu
- classic scheme
- desktop icons (yes show my computer, no don't show my documents)
- turn off effects, animations, and sounds
- 3D white mouse pointer, no shadow
- open a folder, set it up (classic view, no web content, details), then folder options -> apply to all folders
- control panel -> classic view
- small apps--Firefox, Acrobat, iTunes, Putty, Crimson Editor, and a few other odds and ends
- big apps--Adobe Suite, MS Office, OpenOffice, etc., depending on what I'm doing and who's paying for it all :-)

I don't do this enough to look into automation. I tried RSYNC once because it's great for other stuff but all it did was show me that about half of my settings must be in the registry--after RSYNCing up, what I had was a hybrid of half my stuff and half Windows defaults. The closest I come to automation is keeping the installers for most things on my server.

For a fun read, check out Mark--he got it down to a simple 147 step process. :-)

Also, Adobe is still unable to provide decent compression on the PNGs its software generates

Not so. Fireworks has always had one of the best PNG compressors of any editing app. (You may be fooled by its native file format, which is PNG with a ton of metadata embedded... exporting as a PNG will lose the metadata but make it WAY smaller.)

A google for "pngcrush fireworks" turns up many such references, e.g.,

http://diveintomark.org/archives/2003/02/08/optimi zing_png_files

Admittedly I've seen several long time Linux users switch to OS X the last 3 years. Interestingly enough however, four of the five I know are switching back, with three out of those four moving to Ubuntu. The cited reasons are expensive upgrades, performance, lack of customiseability and lack of a working package manager with a good selection of packages (from experience I agree that Fink and Darwin Ports are pretty poor). While developing a project in OS X recently I was surprised to come across many mentions of Ubuntu in Mac-only forums and blogs; it would seem that the Linux mindshare is increasing amongst the die-hard Apple fan.

That said, I have yet to come across more long time OS X users switching to Linux for the reasons Mark Pilgrim and BoingBoing's Doctorow have (to cite just two well known examples). Perhaps this will increase. Linux certainly has a few rough edges, but it's clear that it has unique qualities some consider far more important in the long term, qualities offered only by a committment to free software, in all it's diversity and through its characteristic decentralised development model.

Linux will always be the people's operating system, made by people for people. "Mainstream" or not, it doesn't really matter, Linux is there for people when the use restrictions imposed by corporations seeking capital gain inevitably fail them.

What happens if you put your essay on-line somewhere because you wanted others to read it, and the bot grabbed it? Would you then be considered to be plagarizing by turnitin?

Not to be the jerk here, but it really shouldn't be that big of a news story that some people discussed the idea that it might not be the best security practice to allow unvalidated user input.

Exactly. This is a minor variation on the same old mistakes web developers usually make. It's just that a lot of developers seem to have forgotten that Atom and RSS feeds need to be sanitised just as much as any other untrusted input.

This is by no means a new concept; off the top of my head, I remember Mark Pilgrim talking about this three years ago, and I remember thinking how damn obvious it was back then and being surprised that it was news to people.

I think one of the contributing factors is that a lot of borderline incompetent developers have learned to sanitise form input not because they understand the problem, but because they've simply had it hammered into their heads that they need to sanitise stuff that comes in through forms. Given a different form of input with exactly the same problem, they don't recognise that they need to sanitise it because it's not coming in through a form. They haven't learned why the problem exists, they've just memorised "form data == sanitise".

Mozilla Thunderbird. It's just like Evolution, except it's intelligently designed

The Boing-boing entry refers to an essential software list on which I particularly loved the recommendation for the web browser:

'Mozilla Thunderbird. It's just like Evolution, except it's intelligently designed.'

I still get an IBM employee discount, which amounted to several hundred dollars.

When I meet Unix users in numbers (mostly at the LinuxBierWanderung where there is a semi-random sampling of roughly 80 people from a bit all over but mostly Europe), what I see is that people who bring Apple laptops (there are a dozen) do so because they don't want to spend time fighting with the arcane hardware of a poorly documented x86 machine. And MacOS is "Unixy" enough for a secondary machine (the main desktops are still some sort of Unix, mostly Linux, with some BSD and a few Solaris thrown in for variety).

When I talked to all of the Apple users, while they all found their Macs to be "adequate", none were especially fond of them, none seemed to have ever considered getting a desktop Mac. The laptops were stopgap measures until Linux was solid enough on that class of machines (which means, proper suspend/sleep, WiFi support, etc., without spending ages poking at the damn thing). Basically they wanted to have the same thing on laptops as they had on their desktops. A solid, no fuss system they understood.

That's what I wanted too. That's why I too got an iBook. I could have gotten a fairly crappy noname Linux machine (that is, with Linux pre-installed) for about twice the price. In the end I went with the safe option. Like the others. Like them I'm not too fond of the Apple system. Like them whenever I use it I really miss the comfort of a proper Linux desktop. Like being able to browse the network easily in KDE, like having properly integrated virtual desktops, network shares that actually make sense to me, being able to move windows to the front and back with the mouse...

I know all this can probably be done with Mac OS (it could probably be done in GEM with enough time) but it's trivial in KDE, even in Gnome. To me MacOS just feels like a polished Windows sitting on top of a BSD toolset. In the end it's just simpler to cut the middleman and get a vanilla Unix box without the extra crud but with the real goodies.

Of course by sticking with Unix you miss on some of the good stuff the Apple guys came up with. Notably the application installation package trick which is simple and elegant, and some Mac apps that are quite nifty (I know I'll miss CopyWrite when I drop MacOS). This does not really matter, most of us will gladly trade more freedom for a little roughness at the edges. In my case, the main freedom is the freedom to keep my own data. Mark Pilgrim, the guy mentionned in the article above switched for the same reason (among others probably, but it seems that this is what tipped him over).

Disclaimer : Note that all of "us" that I mentionned above are long time computer geeks past the "tinkering stage" (some of us are actually past middle aged) and set in our ways. So the above is in no way representative of the general geek population and is absolutely not representative at all of random computer users. FWIW I also keep a Windows partition for games.

Also, Mark Pilgrim is running Ubuntu on an Apple machine, so Apple is still getting his money. Cory Doctorcow OTOH has switched to a Lenovo (IIRC).

Wrong, Mark Pilgrim uses a brand new Lenovo ThinkCentre M52

Who cares? Well, some very smart people do. (Of those, Tim Bray himself switching as well.)

Whether you personally know or respect Mark, Tim and Cory, they're being looked to by a huge amount of others for guidance. This isn't a lightly made switch - "oh you know, I have a spare box lying around and I'm going to see how this shiny new OS works out, and then next week I'll go and play with Gentoo, and I've always been meaning to give Solaris a try as well". This is people with a tremendous amount of experience and knowledge, having spent their whole life on Macs, deciding that enough is enough, that the bough has broken, and that they care more about their data than about anything else. They all have a huge following, and their thoughts will reverberate.

Most people who will actually read their thoughts (rather than going for the knee-jerk "no, it's Monday so apple is good!" slashdot reaction that I've seen far too many posters here resort to) will probably be set thinking because of it. And everyone will make up their own minds, and most people will probably decide not to switch, for reasons that for them will be very valid. But you can sure as hell bet that the importance of open data formats and lack of DRM will become more of a talking point in the months to come, and that if Apple doesn't heed this warning, more and more people will come to the same conclusions as Mark, Time and Cory have.

(If you want to get the whole story, I'd read the following articles in this order:

1. Mark Pilgrim: Bye Apple
2. Mark Pilgrim: When the Bough Breaks
3. John Gruber: And Oranges
4. Mark Pilgrim: Juggling Oranges
5. Tim Bray: Time to Switch?
6. Cory Doctorow: Mark Pilgrim's list of Ubuntu essentials for ex-Mac users

Who cares? Well, some very smart people do. (Of those, Tim Bray himself switching as well.)

Whether you personally know or respect Mark, Tim and Cory, they're being looked to by a huge amount of others for guidance. This isn't a lightly made switch - "oh you know, I have a spare box lying around and I'm going to see how this shiny new OS works out, and then next week I'll go and play with Gentoo, and I've always been meaning to give Solaris a try as well". This is people with a tremendous amount of experience and knowledge, having spent their whole life on Macs, deciding that enough is enough, that the bough has broken, and that they care more about their data than about anything else. They all have a huge following, and their thoughts will reverberate.

Most people who will actually read their thoughts (rather than going for the knee-jerk "no, it's Monday so apple is good!" slashdot reaction that I've seen far too many posters here resort to) will probably be set thinking because of it. And everyone will make up their own minds, and most people will probably decide not to switch, for reasons that for them will be very valid. But you can sure as hell bet that the importance of open data formats and lack of DRM will become more of a talking point in the months to come, and that if Apple doesn't heed this warning, more and more people will come to the same conclusions as Mark, Time and Cory have.

(If you want to get the whole story, I'd read the following articles in this order:

1. Mark Pilgrim: Bye Apple
2. Mark Pilgrim: When the Bough Breaks
3. John Gruber: And Oranges
4. Mark Pilgrim: Juggling Oranges
5. Tim Bray: Time to Switch?
6. Cory Doctorow: Mark Pilgrim's list of Ubuntu essentials for ex-Mac users

Who cares? Well, some very smart people do. (Of those, Tim Bray himself switching as well.)

Whether you personally know or respect Mark, Tim and Cory, they're being looked to by a huge amount of others for guidance. This isn't a lightly made switch - "oh you know, I have a spare box lying around and I'm going to see how this shiny new OS works out, and then next week I'll go and play with Gentoo, and I've always been meaning to give Solaris a try as well". This is people with a tremendous amount of experience and knowledge, having spent their whole life on Macs, deciding that enough is enough, that the bough has broken, and that they care more about their data than about anything else. They all have a huge following, and their thoughts will reverberate.

Most people who will actually read their thoughts (rather than going for the knee-jerk "no, it's Monday so apple is good!" slashdot reaction that I've seen far too many posters here resort to) will probably be set thinking because of it. And everyone will make up their own minds, and most people will probably decide not to switch, for reasons that for them will be very valid. But you can sure as hell bet that the importance of open data formats and lack of DRM will become more of a talking point in the months to come, and that if Apple doesn't heed this warning, more and more people will come to the same conclusions as Mark, Time and Cory have.

(If you want to get the whole story, I'd read the following articles in this order:

1. Mark Pilgrim: Bye Apple
2. Mark Pilgrim: When the Bough Breaks
3. John Gruber: And Oranges
4. Mark Pilgrim: Juggling Oranges
5. Tim Bray: Time to Switch?
6. Cory Doctorow: Mark Pilgrim's list of Ubuntu essentials for ex-Mac users

1992, eh? These people have been active users and developers on Macs since respectively 1983 and 1984.
They have indeed come to the Mac. And now they've gone from it, and you might just want to listen up and find out why.

I've already seen several comments saying that this is no big deal, obviously thinking that these people only 'recently' switched to Macs. But that isn't the case.
Mark Pilgrim has been a Mac user since 1983. Cory Doctorow since 1984. These people have lived and breathed Macs - and they're now giving up on them, and not just for a whim, but in very well-thought out and carefully explained reasons. You might not agree with them, but at the least do them to justice of reading and considering their thoughts and not dismissing them out of hand.
(And for example Tim Bray is another long-standing Mac using visionary who's recognized that open data is more important than all the very good reasons why staying with a Mac is the easier choice.)

If you want to be an anti-spam advocate, if you want to write software or maintain a list or provide a service that identifies spam or blocks spam or targets spam in any way, you will be attacked. You will be attacked by professionals who have more money than you, more resources than you, better programmers than you, and no scruples at all. They want to make money, this is how they have decided to make money, they really can make a lot of money, and youre getting in their way.

[...]Someone challenged me, Well, how am I supposed to continue hosting these low-barrier discussions? I'm sorry, but I don't know. To quote Bruce Schneier, "I feel rather like the physicist who just explained relativity to a group of would-be interstellar travelers, only to be asked, 'How do you expect us to get to the stars, then?' I'm sorry, but I don't know that, either."

From Dive Into Mark (which doesn't seem to be responding, so try Google's cache.)

In the OSS spirit, I rolled up my sleeves and started googling around for a HOWTO make my own porn, but all I came up with was this HOWTO Put Porn On Your iPod!

how about as follows:

1. create a html page that does a redirect to another one within a specific amount of time or a html page with a javascript using xmlhttp to send information to server. I'm betting the spiders won't obey the redirect in the particular time given, and they won't interpret the javascript to send you the information you want back on the page (this won't be good for those who have javascripting turned off but there are other ways around this). You will of course need to set a cookie from this page so that you can monitor the behavior of anything that hits this page.

2. link to this page from a random page in your site from an area that is rendered invisible to pretty much any browser supporting css. Could probably do it invisible via other methods as well, but I'll go with that

3. Set robots.txt to disallow crawling this file.

4. Anything that shows up at this page should have a higher chance of being a crawler or bot then other things.

5. put other checking on this page as need be, I can think of quite a number of things I would want to do to make sure it was not a person.

6. disallow anything that ends up here from anywhere else, return 404s to this thing so it just decides that your site is screwed up, or

7. Put it into a bot trap, examine how it reacts, how long does it take for it to break out of the trap. Might be good to have this info, if the bot is 'smarter' it might be made to determine if it's in a trap, if so the general method is to ignore this site thenceforth because it is a bad site with bot traps.

Finally, as for blocking: http://diveintomark.org/archives/2003/02/26/how_to _block_spambots_ban_spybots_and_tell_unwanted_robo ts_to_go_to_hell

-Bryan Rasmussen, too lazy to set up a new account

Read those first. It seemed at the time of the publication that the XHTML 2.0 team were making all the mistakes of the designers of HTML 3.0 - creating teh perfekt markup language, instead of contributing called-for improvements, even if the two overlap a lot to our benefit. And I don't think that's changed. (I don't mean to disparage the many good changes in XHTML 2.0, but I ultimately think that their goal (stripping down and semantically cleansing XHTML 1.1?) is a different one than mine, and that that means we're not getting the improvements we want.)

My money's with, and my faith's in, HTML5.

Read those first. It seemed at the time of the publication that the XHTML 2.0 team were making all the mistakes of the designers of HTML 3.0 - creating teh perfekt markup language, instead of contributing called-for improvements, even if the two overlap a lot to our benefit. And I don't think that's changed. (I don't mean to disparage the many good changes in XHTML 2.0, but I ultimately think that their goal (stripping down and semantically cleansing XHTML 1.1?) is a different one than mine, and that that means we're not getting the improvements we want.)

My money's with, and my faith's in, HTML5.

And, as Mark Pilgrim's original email which is the basis of TFA points out, Apple haven't even implemented XML namespace support correctly.

All the cool kids use Greasemonkey: unping.user.js

Some things that aren't inluded in that list:

1. Convert large text files and into notes for use on iPod
2. Rip DVD Movies To Your iPod Using Free Software
3. Use your iPod Photo or Nano as a Yahoo! Maps directions viewer
4. How-To: Get TV shows off of your TiVo and onto your iPod

...Which brings me to the second thing. THIS IS NOT A HOBBY. If you want to be an anti-spam advocate, if you want to write software or maintain a list or provide a service that identifies spam or blocks spam or targets spam in any way, you will be attacked...

http://diveintomark.org/archives/2003/11/15/more-s pam

You can use ffmpegx on the Mac to convert your Tivo togo files to iPod ready MPEG-4. It's free (as in beer) and is a great GUI for the ffmpeg app.

Here's a tutorial on using ffmpegx to create iPod ready videos (Link is not worksafe!)

Ah, come on now, sex sells. And, anyway, why would you sell a product that's not letting the customer use it for whatever they want? As soon as the product leaves the company, the company has nothing to do with what it's used for. Censorship is always worse than the content being censored. Just like with everything else, there is a way of getting around it -- there's a guide on how to convert pornographic material so it can still be put on iPods. I wish companies put their money on improving the features rather than to stop the customers from using it for whatever they want.

Soon monitors will be banned because they're used to view porn.

Actually PSPVideo9 adds some strange MP4 headers to the .MP4 files that the PSP requires. The iPod Video may require some strange headers too, but it is unlikely. It is unknown if it will play the PSP MP4 files with the odd headers, but it is likely.

Then there is the fact that the iPod can play H.264 Baseline Profile Level 1.3 while the PSP can play H.264 Baseline Profile Level 3. You can compress video for the iPod with FFmpegX if you are using a Mac: http://diveintomark.org/howto/ipod-porn-conversion -guide/

It uses the great open-source h264 codec X264.

http://diveintomark.org/howto/ipod-dvd-ripping-gui de/

Of course, this setting is only easily visible if you buy QuickTime Pro. Grr.

I've had good luck with a combination of Mac the Ripper and Handbrake, as detailed here:

http://diveintomark.org/howto/ipod-dvd-ripping-gui de/

Omit MtR if your video isn't on a DVD.

It's only tomorrow, but:

Instructions for ripping a DVD to an iPod-compatible quicktime movie.

To sort of counter my own point there, here is a process by which you can convert your DVD's to be used on The iPod.

http://diveintomark.org/howto/ipod-dvd-ripping-gui de/

The program used has downloads for OSX, Source, Debian and BeOS

You know, it's almost frightening how far down in the Slashdot comments I had to scroll before I FINALLY saw someone asking this question.

Seriously, rip your DVD porn into iTunes with Handbrake (Here's a HOWTO for the uninitiated) and you've got the perfect, private, pocketable porno player... with alliteration, even.

I'm suprised the GOP hasn't already pre-ordered every single one of these "to protect the children".

Product Activation. Sure, you could get rid of it with a russian crack, but then you need to find another one with each update...

Also its not funny to turn off all those annoying "features", even with xp-antispy and friends.

I have not had any problem with games using w2k. Really old games run perfectly with dosbox. Drivers are always updated with those from the manufacturer, except the bt878, with a much better open source driver.

No artificial 800x600 limit, a 640x480 desktop looks better on tv...

Home Edition edition has so many artificial limitations its not even funny to mention. Just wait for the fun with the (at least 7) different Vista "flavors"...

Finally: If what you have is doing the job just fine, why bother?

Fisher Price bloatware activated limitations are not worth it. I admit fast boot is nice to have, but im not rebooting everyday... Nothing else is worth it.

How to install Windows XP in 5 hours or less

The reasons may be lame, but the problems with correct MIME types and how they *break people's web browsers* (I am not *only* talking about IE) are real and not to be underestimated. Required reading: http://diveintomark.org/archives/2003/01/14/eddies _in_the_spacetime_continuum

The real problem is how people are trying to morph XHTML 2.0 into The Perfect Markup Language. They also did that with HTML 3.0. Does anyone here use HTML 3.0? No, you use at least HTML 3.2, the *backwards compatible* one, that was put in place when people actually wanted to go forward and not listen to perfectionists bickering all day long. (However, you probably use HTML 4.01 or any of the XHTML versions. But that's not the point.)

I'm not saying people shouldn't try to create a better markup language, but I am saying that the XHTML branch is the only branch of HTML that's still being developed, and it's not a wise decision to basically EOL a lot of the language. Some of the presentational HTML tags (the font tag, anyone?) deserved cutting. They're already deprecated, and CSS is way better for controlling stuff like that. These people are trying to throw out the br tag. Not deprecate it. Yank it. One of these days, wham, straight to the moon. If you ask me, that dog won't hunt, monsignore.

And finally, I join the rest of you in welcoming the Slashdot adaptation of four year old practises. It's good to have you onboard.

Too late to get modded up, but what the hell. No, Vista will not be the spark that ignites Linux. Win98 was pretty unstable. Did Linux take over then? No. Win ME sucked ass. Did Linux take over then? No. Win2k was pretty nice but wasn't shipped on much consumer hardware. Did Linux take over then? No. WinXP is annoying as fuck, what with balloons popping up everywhere (Take a tour! This is the start menu! Wireless is here! Wireless is gone! Hey, wireless is back! No, wait, gone again!) and all the activation BS, not to mention spyware, viruses, self-spreading bad stuff, etc. Did Linux take over? No. Vista? Well, technically I can't see into the future, but I'm a pretty good guesser.

"Whether it's the lack of a new file system or the Monad scripting shell, the absence of innovation in this operating system is giving it a black eye." One second--you think customers care one fucking bit about innovation in an OS? What planet is this guy on that he thinks people care about a fucking FILESYSTEM or SHELL?!?!?* I'm gonna say this once really loud for the cheap seats: WINDOWS IS POPULAR BECAUSE IT'S THE OS ON THE CHEAPEST COMPUTERS OUT THERE!!!!!!!111oneoneone. The 5% of customers that do care about innovation already have a home: they're at the Apple store.

* note: Windows does ship with a shell. But no one needs it. (Because Windows also ships with a GUI, natch.) Before writing another article like this, do this simple test: walk up to 50 people and ask them about the shell in Windows.
- 46 will go "huh?"
- 2 will say "cmd.exe but I have no use for it." (You just stumbled across two people who work in IT or a computer store.)
- 1 will say "cmd.exe and I use it once in a while because I've been using PCs for 20 years and I still do things there 'cause I'm used to it."
- And exactly one will say "cmd.exe but I don't use it 'cause it's teh sux0rz! When I get a new comp the first thing I do is use IE to download Firefox and then I use Firefox to download Cygwin!" (Read that page, it's really funny. I love that story.)

Monad is very cool but even if MS would have shipped it in Vista, did you really think you were going to spend next thanksgiving teaching your mom how to use it? "Look, mom, here--I just pipe this through that, and what makes Monad even cooler than bash is that it isn't just text coming out, these are actual objects, so I can take these results and..." Uh-huh. Right.

Bullcrap

All of RSS's 9 varieties are so similar they can easily be parsed by a single parser.

Atom has currently two varieties: 0.3 (widely used, though deprecated and denounced) and 1.0 (official IETF standard, but not very widely used yet). As with RSS's varieties, these are also not strictly compatible, though are easily parsed by the same code.

Both RSS 1.0 and RSS 2.0 support HTML natively and support XHTML through extensions.

RSS 2.0 is extensible through namespaces just like RSS 1.0 and ATOM.

RSS 1.0 is based on RDF, making it IMHO more complicated than both Atom and RSS 2.0.

Atom is much better defined than RSS.

A good (though slightly biased) overview of the differences between Atom and RSS can be found here.

RSS with its 9+1 incompatible versions is hardly a standard for anything. It is a huge pain for a implementer to decide which versions to support. Microsoft decided to support (one version of) RSS for now because it has been around for longer and we know how reticent is Microsoft to everythig new. So, for Microsot, RSS is of course better then nothing.

However, it is just wrong to say that the format war is over and RSS has won. Atom is a coherent standard now being finished under the umbrella of the IETF , and it is just now just starting to catch. And it will, because many of us have had enough RSS bullshit. We already had a disscussion with the guy behind RSS 3.0 which convinced me that with guys like him writing the RSS specs (just for the love of writing), RSS is REALLY DOOMED.

More info on the weblog spam problem

No. It won't

They will keep coming and coming and coming until you give up, go home, cry uncle, take Prozac, get a regular day job to replace the one you quit when being an anti-spammer became your full-time job.

AJAX will work with nearly any major browser off the shelf. poof.

Bzzt. Wrong.

"AJAX" will work with Internet Explorer, Gecko-based browsers, and Apple's Safari, and nothing else, because these are the only browsers to have included implementations of the XMLHTTPRequest object yet.

Oh, your client uses Konqueror? Or a cell phone? Or may ever use a user-agent other than the big three? Now you have to program a second, stripped down, clunky version just for that contingency. Try using the most widely deployed enterprise "AJAX" app out there -- Microsoft's Outlook Web Access -- in IE and then Firefox and you'll see what I mean.

Why does OWE degrade in Firefox? Doesn't "AJAX" work "off the shelf" in all major browsers? Well, the problem is that each of these browsers has their own incompatible implementation of XMLHTTPRequest. So you have to sniff out which browser the client is using and do your "AJAX" according to what it's expecting. (This is because of XMLHTTPRequest's origins as a proprietary IE extension to the browser API.)

Microsoft, naturally, only supports the IE flavor of "AJAX" in OWE. But you're not Microsoft and you probably don't get to dictate browsers like that, so you'll have to code around and cover all of them. If you're using an "AJAX toolkit", you're not seeing all this cruft because it's being hidden under a layer of abstraction; but that doesn't mean it's not there.

Because there is no standardized, according-to-Hoyle way to implement "AJAX", when you use it you do so at the risk of sacrificing something important -- forward compatibility. For some applications that's not a concern, but you might want to think about whether that's true for your app before you run and rewrite the whole thing in "AJAX" just because that's teh new hotness.

(Oh, and have you given thought to what happens when visually-impaired people use your kewl "AJAX" app?)

That's a timeline, not a list of versions. Mark's post, "The Myth of RSS Compatibility", is a more accurate list of the discrepancies between various RSS implementations.

That's a timeline, not a list of versions. Mark's post, "The Myth of RSS Compatibility", is a more accurate list of the discrepancies between various RSS implementations.

Five? There are nine different versions of RSS. Not counting this new RSS 3.0, or the previous RSS 3.0 that has been around for years.

When would serving XHTML 1.0 as text/html be a bad idea?

One example would be if you have to write web pages in certain languages. RFC 2854 says that you have to follow Appendix C of the XHTML 1.0 specification. Appendix C says that you can't use the XML prolog. XML 1.0 says that if you don't use the XML prolog, then you are restricted to the UTF-8 or UTF-16 character encodings. Compatibility issues make these suboptimal choices for certain languages.

Or are you simply stating that, all things being equal[1], you'd serve XHTML 1.0 as application/xhtml+xml?

I prefer to serve XHTML as text/html, but have it accessible as application/xhtml+xml for testing. Serving application/xhtml+xml means either dropping Internet Explorer support (not feasible for most people), or using content negotiation (which lowers your cache hit rate, increasing load on the server and raising bandwidth bills).

On the other hand, I mostly recommend that people use HTML 4.01 instead of XHTML, because there are a lot of subtle ways in which you can make mistakes with XHTML, and unless you are a specification pedant like me, you won't know about them. Or, as Mark Pilgrim would put it, "Most developers are morons, and the rest are assholes." Until the developer toolsets improve significantly, only the assholes will be able to do XHTML correctly. (You shouldn't read too much into the "morons" bit; it's rhetoric rather than a low opinion).

[1] For example, if MSIE understood what application/xhtml+xml content was.

If Internet Explorer understood it, and associated software (e.g. JAWS and IBM Homepage Reader), then I'd probably just switch over to application/xhtml+xml completely. In fact, I think most people should, since it's so much easier to weed out bugs.

I freely admit that I'm linking to this article that might show some bias. Why might it be biased?

1) It was written by Mark Pilgrim, one of the major minds behind creating the specification for Atom.
2) Mark's a personal friend of mine, and I personally think he makes sense.

The point of the article is, however, that RSS is terribly broken and fragmented, versions aren't compatible with each other, and it's just a plain mess. Look further on his site and you'll see articles as to not only why he helped create Atom 1.0 but articles with early specs.

RSS is a wonderful idea, now it has to be implemented properly. One good way to do this is to start over.

The trouble with RSS (short answer) is that there are at least three different versions of it invented by different people.

Three? Try nine.

As far as I know there was an RSS 0.7, then someone else invented a new protocol and called it RSS 1, then the original person invented RSS and called it version 2

No. The short version is that somebody at Netscape invented 0.9something based on RDF. The public release (another 0.9something) was rushed for my.netscape.com and wasn't based on RDF. Then Netscape abandoned the format, and Dave Winer republished the 0.9something specification. He made a couple more basic changes, all 0.9somethings. Then somebody else published a 1.0 that was again based on RDF. Dave threw a hissy fit, accusing them of stealing "his" RSS, and renamed 0.9something as 2.0.

It's more or less true that 1.0 was released as a fait accompli, however unintentional. However the real thorn stopping people from working together is, and always has been, Dave Winer. The guy's an asshole.

The trouble with RSS (short answer) is that there are at least three different versions of it invented by different people.

It's easy to see why developing a robust feed parser is a real challenge (albeit a necessary one, to hide the current standards chaos from users).

Why on earth ANYONE would use the JSF for personal transportation is beyond me.

I'd just like to note that people don't use military fighters for personal transportation. Also, no one in there right mind would take a jet fighter to pick up the groceries, or go to the movie theater. When it comes down to the right tool for the job, a broken donkey cart is probably better than a jet fighter.

That said there are linux distros that are plenty user fiendly. For me an ubuntu install takes about 1-2 hours (and most of it doesn't require supervision), while a windows install is more like 5 hours.