RSS Version 3 Specs Up for Review

Jonathan Avidan writes "The RSS 3 Homepage now offers its first publicly available specification, the RSS 3 Lite-type Specification First Draft, intended for review and commenting for revision. RSS 3 is a reworking of RSS 2.0, filling the gaps and removing unnecessary features and is fully backwards-compatible, rather than a new format."

Comments

Unnecessary features

[kevin_conaway]

How does one remove features and still remain backwards compatible?

Re:Unnecessary features

[Anonymous Coward]

You remove features for which support was optional. Old implementations should discover that you're not using the options, new implementations no longer even check for them.

An implementing client should support everything

[hritcu]

Also worth mentioning is that the Atom syndication standard, currently in development, is out of this standard's scope and does not concern it. Due to contradiction in structure, the standards cannot rely on one another, yet an implementing client should support both standards.

How about all five RSS 0.92, RSS 1.0, RSS 2.0, RSS 3.0 and of course ATOM. This will be really a joy for implementers.

Re:Gzip RSS

[Bogtha]

Why isn't gzip compression of RSS feeds part of the specification?

It is. It's part of the HTTP specification, RFC 2616. Every data format transmitted over HTTP can take advantage of it. There's no need to treat RSS as a special case.

Re:Awful, awful idea

[Bogtha]

Yeah, that was my first thought, but he mentions Dave "RSS 2" as an editor and says he's had a period of private review in his process list.

Where? I see Dave mentioned a lot on that website, but nothing so far that indicates Dave even knows about this. For example:

The current standard, RSS 3 Class (which engulfs RSS 3 Lite, RSS 3 Full, RCDL and RRDL), is based on RSS 2.0, which was offered by the Berkmen Center for Internet & Society at Harvard Law School under the License, authored by Dave Winer (other accredited authors: Roger Cadenhead, Adam Curry and Steve Zellers). This is a derivative work which is meant to replace the 2.0 version.

This sounds like Dave's got something to do with RSS 3 at first glance, but in actual fact, it merely says that he co-authored the RSS 2.0 specification, and that this guy, Jonathan Avidan, wrote a specification that is based on that specification. Dave's listed as "a relevant link", but only with respect to him authoring the RSS 2 specification. He's mentioned again, but once more, only that Jonathan Avidan is indebted to him for writing the RSS 2 specification:

For informative purposes, the RSS Version 2.0.1 specification can be found here and is attributed to Dave Winer, amongst others. This is a derivative work and is indebted to their genius and efforts.

The closest that website comes to claiming "Dave Winer approval", is in the FAQ. However, that's a copy of Dave's history of RSS, except for the fact that the original copy doesn't mention RSS 3.0 at all. It just looks like he copied that page, stuck "According to Dave Winer" at the beginning, and "RSS 3 begins development" at the end.

Remember, Dave considers RSS to be "finished". From the RSS 2.0 specification:

Therefore, the RSS spec is, for all practical purposes, frozen at version 2.0.1. We anticipate possible 2.0.2 or 2.0.3 versions, etc. only for the purpose of clarifying the specification, not for adding new features to the format. Subsequent work should happen in modules, using namespaces, and in completely new syndication formats, with new names.

Re:rss3?

[Bogtha]

In fact, fuck XML altogether. The Internet got along just fine using custom text/binary based formats for three decades.

Er, you do realise that XML is merely a simplified subset of SGML, on which HTML is based? Hard to agree that the Internet "got along just fine", when its killer app is based on something that is very similar to XML, only far more complicated

But the tag-based syntax is optimised for specifying a tree-structured document and the attributes of text it contains.

Sounds like RSS to me.