Slashdot Mirror
Google Finally Moves Toward RSS Standard
declan writes "My News.com colleague Evan Hansen just got his hands on an internal email thread revealing that Google is planning to embrace RSS. Evan's co-authored News.com article quotes from the email (sent to Sergey Brin, Larry Page, and Eric Schmidt) confirming that Google is rethinking only supporting Atom. Slashdot covered Google's purchase of Pyra Labs and Blogger.com/Blogspot.com last year that made it a fan of the Atom standard. Does this news mean that RSS is now viewed as out of Dave Winer's control? Will RSS and Atom finally converge?"
Will RSS and Atom finally converge?
HOPE SO! Blogging has moved so fast that the tangled web of RSS protocols is confusing to RSS publishers and users alike.
Far more important than their individual features would be a single standard, so that publi7shing tools could stop bothering about compatibility issues and get on with features people care about.
Only Google has the power to create an RSS standard. Google, you're our only hope!
Microsoft, are you watching?
Read the EFF's Fair Use FAQ
Out of sync ? LATE ?
...
:)
People! Your aggregator might be out of sync, not the website RSS feed.
If you update the sources every 5 minutes it is still better than reloading the whole site every 5 minutes (and some sites have update time policies eg every 10 mins)
The feed most likely comes from the same db and as so it is not outdated.
Useful ? well if you use a PDA over a GPRS link, it is really cool to have just headlines that consume a few bytes, instead of loading 20 websites with all the ads and gfx (could be megabytes)
I think it is a cool thing, and even if you do not have a decent aggregator you can sed and grep and awk it to assemble a desired format
just my 1cent opinion
What do we have to do to convince people that it isn't controlled by Dave Winer or anyone else?
Stop lying by saying it is not?
The specification is released under a Creative Commons license and no ownership is claimed of the format embodied by the specification.
Yes, it is under a Creative Commons license. So what? perl is GPL'd, but no one would say p5p doesn't control it. Sure, there's some slight difference in the case of true ownership, but the real difference is that there is a recognized body that everyone looks to, and that body was created by Dave, and is controlled in no small measure by Dave.
The fact is that anyone who tries to improve upon or modify RSS is met with Dave's wrath. And this is precisely why Atom exists. There can never be convergence because Dave is still involved, and -- as evidence by the fact that he has several times over several years said he would no longer be invovled, but still is -- he likely forever will be.
I wish the parent post could be modded up even further. The problem with RSS is that the spec is sufficiently vague that it is practically guaranteed that any RSS parser you write will eventually encounter an RSS feed that is valid according to the spec but cannot be correctly parsed. It's a mess.
If you really want to open your eyes, download the Universal Feed Parser and take a look at the enormous number of test cases that the author uses.
It's hoped that Atom will benefit from the tremendous amount of accumulated experience and knowledged gained by watching the failures of RSS. The analogy might be that Atom is to RSS as XHTML 2.0 is to HTML, with the exception that we hope it's not too late to adopt Atom (as is surely the case with XHTML 2.0).
Roger, here's what you have to do to convince people that RSS isn't controlled by Dave Winer:
-- Document and disclose the process for choosing members of the advisory board. Who issues the invitations? Who decides who to invite to be a member? If a member quits, who decides who will fill the empty slot?
-- Enlarge the board so that Dave has to convince more than one person in order to get his way.
-- Get people on the board who are not perceived by the public, correctly or incorrectly, as being Dave's cronies. It would be especially useful to get someone with technical stature in the business who has not been involved in the controversy.
-- Eventually, convince Dave to retire from the board. The "Charles Goldfarb" factor is real, and a lot of people will just not participate if it means interacting with Dave, however unfair or irrational that feeling may be.
(Comments similar to this post have been deleted by Dave from his message board.)
As I've said elsewhere: The difference between a completed technical standard placed under the Creative Commons and a truly open one is the difference between being allowed to scribble over the President's name in the newspaper and being able to vote for his opponent in the first place.
I could take the CC-licensed RSS spec and change it however I wanted, and it wouldn't help things one bit because it wouldn't be an accepted standard any further than my own hard drive. It would just be another incompatible spec calling itself RSS 2.0 that developers have to deal with.