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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."
How does one remove features and still remain backwards compatible?
Damn, and I *just* got around to implementing RSS1 in my CMS ... ah well. :)
... plans are afoot for Microsoft to co-opt RSS and rename it "web feeds"[from El Reg, so take it with a pinch of snuff]. Now, that is a better name, but it wouldn't be the first time that some incompatible variations got added to an open standard during this process (*cough* Kerberos).
Athletic Scholarships to universities make as much sense as academic scholarships to sports teams.
They removed
:)
<clouds>
<skipHours>
<skipDays>
<textInput>
<source> element
<pics> element
<guid> element's optional "isPemraLink" attribute
And added
The <comments> element's optional "type" attribute
The <pubDate> element's optional "type" attribute
The <ttl> element's optional "span" attribute
Looks like good news for bloggers and God knows what for stuff like GeoRSS or BlogTorrents
I've been waiting for that a long time now
Quidquid latine dictum sit, altum videtur
Why isn't gzip compression of RSS feeds part of the specification? I'd have thought it'd be a natural thing to include for a format designed for minimizing bandwidth usage.
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.
If you don't fail at least 90 percent of the time, you're not aiming high enough. (Alan Kay)
I'm sure you're wrong. Microsoft will undoubtedly implement RSS 3.0 into Longhorn with no changes. After all, they're committed to Open Standards.
No folly is more costly than the folly of intolerant idealism. - Winston Churchill
that this happens on the day after the IETF announces that it's approved the ATOM syndication format?
o mpub-format-11.txt
Announcement reproduced below:
The IESG has approved the following document:
- 'The Atom Syndication Format' as a Proposed Standard
This document is the product of the Atom Publishing Format and Protocol Working Group.
The IESG contact persons are Scott Hollenbeck and Ted Hardie.
A URL of this Internet-Draft is:
http://www.ietf.org/internet-drafts/draft-ietf-at
Technical Summary:
This document describes the Atom format for syndication. It is XML-based and is considered to be the successor to the earlier RSS formats. Its primary use is for web-based content, but is expected to be used for non-web content as well, such as personal news feeds.
Working Group Summary:
Some members of the working group remain unenthusiastic about some sections of the document, but the chairs strongly believe that there is rough (or better) consensus in support of the document as a whole.
For some of the parts with the most contention, there cannot be more than very rough consensus due to basic differences in the way people would design parts of the format, particularly given that we have many models in existence with the different flavors of RSS. For some parts of the document, there is contention about whether or not a particular item should or should not be in the Atom core versus being an extension. For some parts, there is contention whether there should be MUST/SHOULD/MAY leeway for content creators in the presence or absence of an element, or the semantic content of an element; the
group really pushed RFC 2119 around during the past few months.
Protocol Quality
Scott Hollenbeck and the XML Directorate have reviewed the specification for the IESG. Test implementations have confirmed basic protocol soundness.
RSS 2 was the one whose development "contradicts all other standards", not RSS 1.0 as you would claim.
Between that and Dave Winer's sheer craziness (and the craziness of those like you who drank too much of Dave's cool-aid), the future lies in the open standard called Atom, not in RSS 2 or RSS 3.
Heck, at this point even RSS 1.0 has a far better chance of success than RSS 2, with more and more people picking it as a base for extensible microformats after realizing that RSS 1.0 got a lot of things right years before most people even realized why they were needed.
Since a lot of search engines are starting to provide results in RSS, why not a "Next", "Back" option? It seems rather useless to be able to get only five results in my favorite aggregator, and I would love to be able to go "forward" within a certain result set. This might also work for sites that provide news stories as well, such as Slashdot, in terms of getting older articles from the past week or two.
I get the feeling that this is a practical joke/troll by Jonathan Avidan - the person who is editing this new specification, the person who maintains the website linked to, and who submitted this article to Slashdot.
Yeah, the RSS 2 specification could do with cleaning up and clarification. No, it's not feasible because of too many people doing stupid things like announcing new versions of RSS all on their own and fragmenting the community.
From the FAQ:
Follow the link. It's a new message board with no posts.
There is zero community behind this "standard", it's just a spec some guy decided to write of his own accord. In contrast, a real community effort, Atom, has just reached 1.0 and is standardized by the IETF. Nobody should take this "RSS 3.0" seriously.
Bogtha Bogtha Bogtha
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.
Bogtha Bogtha Bogtha
I'll swear in court if necessary (though if necessary, then we've gone too far, haven't we?) that I had no idea the IETF approved Atom until reading the comments here. It was published today because it got finished today, simple as that.
Yrs John XXX
The site says that Atom is "similar in purpose", so amounts to this: they're trying to do the same thing as Atom, but in a way that will make the current situation even more confusing (and that will probably drive Dave Winer crazy)
It's explained in the terminology page and the terminology section in the spec. In short - normative equals "for implementation", "non-normative" means "of recommendation or suggestion nature" and "informative" means, well, "for further details only".
Yrs John XXX
Wow you have put a lot of effort into this, but have you talked with anyone in the community? Why not participate in Atom discussions, why go off an implement yet another flavour of RSS. I call "practical joke" or lame attempt at getting "internet famous".
Something Witty Goes Here
So I basically have to link this from here, maybe people will learn eventually.
7
This whole mess is just not funny anymore.
http://www.kuro5hin.org/story/2002/11/10/122820/9
You're looking at the wrong specification. RSS is transmitted over HTTP. HTTP provides authentication.
The thing preventing this is that common feed readers do not support enough of HTTP's features to be able to supply a username and password in a standard HTTP way.
Like gzip compression, above, this isn't a problem that needs to be solved on a format-by-format basis. The transfer protocol handles it for all formats.
Bogtha Bogtha Bogtha
1. The term "normative" describes sections (or comments/notes) which describes behaviors and feature to which implementors must adhere
2. The term "informative" describes sections (or comments/notes) which give certain details for further knowledge and do not describe behavior to which implementors must adhere
3. The term "non-normative" describes sections (or comments/notes) which describe behaviors or features of recommendation nature or changing nature
4. The words "must", "must not", "required", "shall", "shall not", "should", "should not", "recommended", "may", "may not" and "optional" are to be interpreted as described in RFC 2119
"A language that doesn't affect the way you think about programming, is not worth knowing" - Alan Perlis
I'm glad you posted that.
I realise that Aaron was probably joking, in order to make fun of Dave Winer, but still, the XML crap is totally pwn3d by his version of RSS 3.
Seriously. Which of these is more compact and easy to read:
or...
Fuck XML's bloatedness. Simple data structures deserve simple file formats. And fuck the supposed "interoperability" and "standards-compliance" of XML, because this RSS 3 format can be parsed with one line of Python using only standard functions.
In fact, fuck XML altogether. The Internet got along just fine using custom text/binary based formats for three decades. Then some fucktards came along and said, "Hey, maybe if we take a markup language intended for specifying attributes of text, and we add some more syntactical rules, all of our problems will be solved!" And then thousands of other clueless W3C-worshippers believed it.
And now we have Tubgirl-esque protocols such as XML-RPC and XMPP (Jabber) which people somehow actually take seriously. What's wrong with people? I know we have huge hard drives and a lot of bandwidth these days, but that doesn't mean we should be going out of our way to waste it!
(I mean no disrespect to the web/Internet standards process as a whole, or the organisations involved. I just think XML is hideously overused. It does have its place, like XHTML -- the DOM does make it possible to do interesting things with DHTML and JavaScript. But the tag-based syntax is optimised for specifying a tree-structured document and the attributes of text it contains. It sickens me that people don't realise this. A data model like RSS is in no place to be specified with XML.)
Signature.
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
Sounds like RSS to me.
Bogtha Bogtha Bogtha