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Netscape Restores RSS DTD, Until July
Randall Bennett writes "RSS 0.91's DTD has been restored to it's rightful location on my.netscape.com, but it'll only stay there till July 1st, 2007. Then, Netscape will remove the DTD, which is loaded four million times each day. Devs, start your caching engines."
And they can't set up a redirect to the new hosting location?
Exercise your right not to vote. thinkoutside.org
The unavailability of this file had the effect of causing certain feed readers - Microsoft's Live.com RSS gadget, for one - to refuse to display RSS 0.91 feeds
Cant they sue Microsoft for stealing bandwidth, and bad design?
Libertarian Leaning Political Discussion Forum.
Developers who made the mistake to use that external resource in their code most likely don't have the brain resources to adapt until July.
(This is not a troll. Resignation and bitterness, maybe. But not a troll.)
Developers should take the opportunity to move to Atom. In the mean time we could use something as simple as round-robin DNS to share the load or have Mozilla, Google or the internet archive host it. It's a historical document and should reside at a permanent URI.
You can't sue Microsoft for bad design!
They're still in business, aren't they?
I know, i was trying to be funny.....hey so where you.
Libertarian Leaning Political Discussion Forum.
Netscape Restores RSS DTD, Until July - from the that's-kinda-lame dept.
Two Stargate SG1 Films Announced - from the good-for-them dept.
Linux: x86 Linux Flash Player 9 is Final - from the i-still-hate-flash dept.
Looks like somebody is having a case of the mondays.
(On Wednesday.)
I admit, I am not familiar enough with RSS. However this is a 2.3KB file that is not supposed to change. Why would developers NOT hardcode it into their RSS tools?
Do Or Do Not, There Is No Spoon, There Is Only Zuul. Everything in the above post is probably opinion.
http://puck.nether.net/rss-0.9.dtd and http://puck.nether.net/rss-0.91.dtd
Slashdot should put in macros to change "it's" to "it is" and "they're" to "they are." I bet that would cut down on grammar mistakes pretty quickly.
As that would give Google another way to track your every online move.
Richard Dawkins asks this very fundamental question, why reproduce (sexually or asexually) using seeds and embryos? Why not propagate by cuttings and cloning? It happens in nature. Many fern like plants do it. Bananas have been reproducing by new shoots. Then he discusses how harmful mutations too propagage and how going back to the basics and recreating the embryo selects the beneficial mutations and puts a check on deletrious mutations. Books The Selfish Gene, Climbing the Mount Improbable.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
Unless we correct such errors, they will propagate, and that's bad for everyone in the long run.
occultae nullus est respectus musicae - originally a Greek proverb
.. and I thought it was only Microsoft and Google that tried to "break the web" on purpose ....
You forgot 'there' ==> "their" and "forget" ==> "forgot"...
Excuse me, but please get off my Pennisetum Clandestinum, eh!
As I replied for the previous Netscape RSS DTD article http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=216818&cid=176 03480, caching DTDs from the network is not the answer if there is the possibility they will not be there in the future:
/ resolver-article.html that helped me out. In addition, if you are using Eclipse with the web tools platform, you can customize the catalog so it resolves DTDs and entities locally. See http://wiki.eclipse.org/index.php/Using_the_XML_Ca talog.
The proper thing to do is for your application to use an XML catalog for resolving entities/URIs and bundle the DTD files with the application. There is a good article at http://xml.apache.org/commons/components/resolver
(I tried posting this as a reply to the blog posting, but I'm not getting the confirmation email, so I'll post it here)
From a purely technical standpoint, I agree with your assertion that, for well-baked files like RSS DTDs, clients should not be relying on a file hosted by an arbitrary service.
That being said, please understand that the emotional message you're sending is: "Don't rely on Netscape".
Why?
Back when RSS was first starting out, Netscape's documentation said to use Netscape URLs for the RSS DTDs. Witness this page, published by Netscape, from late 2000:
Now, a shade over six years later, Netscape is saying "Oh, yeah, what we told you to do? Never mind. We're not supporting it any more."
If Netscape/AOL was shutting its doors, that'd be one thing. If the service in question was obviously onerous, that too would be understandable. Or, if Netscape told people "For the love of all that is holy, don't use our URLs for your DTD needs!" from the get-go (based on that document, you didn't), any such reliance would be our own fault.
But, because AOL does not want to serve up two static files, each of which is smaller than the "Netscape Reports" graphic on the netscape.com home page, Netscape is abandoning a service they told people to use.
So what are we to think about Netscape's current services and their long-term usability?
The Busy Coder's Guide to Android Development
"should feed readers be relying on the availability of a static document on a third-party Web server (and thus a connection to the Internet)?"
Yeah, feed readers don't need the internet at all! What WERE you guys thinking?
I never understood why web pages need references to these external things (or do they?). Why embed into a page a pointer to a document that you don't have direct control over? My own dumb pages do this as well since I switched from plain HTML to using CSS and SVG, but I don't have the time to figure out why it's in there or if it's needed. I just pasted it in like the examples I found. Now if I thought my web page was really important, I'd look into this a bit more...
That's a domain for use in documentation. I bet the bandwidth costs from attempted email delivery are huge even though there are no MX records and the server doesn't accept SMTP connections. In addition to spam harvesting, people like me have been using xyz@example.com to satisfy email address requirements for years. Ideally a production MTA would return example.com email as undeliverable without attempting delivery.
Attempting email delivery to example(.com|.org|.net) is roughly analogous to developers not caching a DTD or hard coding third-party NTP server addresses into their code.
You have five months to update your apps to use RSS DTD version 0.92!
An old Jedi mind trick:
Its apostrophe is missing, because it's been moved over here.
Sorry, I'm a writer. That makes you raw material.
This is the perfect reason to use URIs hosted on p2p, rather than individual sites. It's going to be more and more of an issue, as RDF takes off.
Elwood: Grammar Nazis!
Jake: Pfft. I hate Grammar Nazis.
That was insightful (hint to mods).
Now we need software that can breed sexually.
Or, more realistically, software that has a finer granularity and greater modularity so that the piece of ancient code that does this can be easily identified and swapped out, without needing to be understood by developers.
"Will future ages believe that such stupid bigotry ever existed!" -- Ivanhoe
It seems to me that having the ability to track the src and dest address of every website viewed (nearly) would be a huge financial gain to companies willing to sell that information. Netscape (read AOL) never really struck me as a "feel good, do good" company and I am surprised that they would not try to profit off of this. I distinctly remember thinking this as motive back when they declared everyone must use their DTD in the first place.
In Greg Bear's book Eon, one of the ideas is building with geometry. A mathematician investigating one such structure asked some engineers to build a pi-meter to use when she was exploring. I wondered what such a thing could mean, and indeed how one would build such a device...
This is why whenever I hear the words "architecture" and "web" in the same sentence that I snicker. Unpolite, but OMFG who designed this junk?
Oh, right. Nobody, really. It's amazing it works at all (... and sometimes it doesn't!)
Djikstra's quip, "If programmers build houses they way they built programs, the first woodpecker to come along would topple civilization" was and remains insightful.
Any sufficiently advanced technology is insufficiently documented.
The web needs some scheme for content based addressing. Like the urn:sha1 scheme used in gnutella. This (and some sort of reasonable caching scheme) would do a lot to alleviate problems like this. It could also help a lot with the Slashdot effect.
Need a Python, C++, Unix, Linux develop
Now we need software that can breed sexually.
Nahh, the risk of virus transmission is too high...
What part of "shall not be infringed" is so hard to understand?
Yes, but Richard Dawkins is married to a hottie from Dr Who. Why should he ever have to use "sex" and "why?" in the same sentence?
/sadfanboy
Slashdot Burying Stories About Slashdot Media Owned
Gamingmuseum.com: Give your 3D accelerator a rest.
http://www.google.com/search?q=%22Brand+Necrophil
You know, Microsoft's street address also says a lot about their mentality.
Ever since they took DevEdge offline without warning, I've been weary to rely on them as a resource. This is just another step toward insignificance.
Don't get it from archive.org. The Internet Archive isn't really set up to have a huge number of quick retrievals of the same tiny item. There's no front-end cache farm, and response will be slow. (This was a problem after they started archiving Greatful Dead fan recordings. The Deadheads, many of whom did too many drugs in the 1960s, would stream the same audio, over and over and over. The music archive had to be moved to a completely different system.)
Try to get this hosted by "w3c.org", which hosts other DTDs and seems to do a good job.
For example, globally unique IDs in Atom feeds are often URNs, and hence URIs; but URNs aren't URLs, and you shouldn't need or want to try to connect to something just because it's used as a globally unique identifier in an Atom feed and looks a bit like a URL.
This is relevant because many Internet specifications use URNs (or in the case of HTML, FPIs) as spec identifiers. For instance, XML namespace identifiers are URIs; and while some of them happen to be URLs too, the XML namespace recommendation says:
In the case of RSS 0.91, Netscape wrote the spec, and they used a URL and told people to connect to it to fetch the necessary information to parse the file. They could have used a URN, but I'm guessing they wanted to keep their options open as far as changing the spec on the fly.
(Of course, Dave Winer has a different approach to changing RSS specs on the fly...)
GCHQ Quantum Insert installed. If only our tongues were made of glass, how much more careful we would be when we speak
Perhaps it should be said that Dawkins begs the question... I think his book is a x00 page answer to said question. (Granted, I haven't read that book, but I know Dawkins' reputation. ;P)
A URN ;)
Universal Resource Name, if I recall correctly (which I often don't)
What's so hard about overlooking petty grammar mistakes? I know I know, your versatility dial is stuck on '0'.
Sending Expires and Cache-Control headers that say "Don't bother retrying for 3 years" might help mitigate some of the bandwidth waste.
That said, he's got a point that the feed readers should work if the DTD isn't retrievable -- but deliberately removing it looks like a great way to say "Netscape isn't reliable."
Imagine a plant with many branches and one branch does better than others and it grows bigger. It eventually touches the ground, sprouts roots and crowds out the mother plant and siblings and continues to grow. And some of its branches mutate, adapt better and the cycle repeats. This is not a far out scenario. It is posible. Not only possible it happened. He cites many plants. I rememer the banana and the banyan tree because I thought of them as examples before he mentioned it in the book. What is wrong with this process? Why the more complex embryonic development supplant it so completely that it is quite difficult to even find examples? His explanation was that when branches mutate, survive better and crowd out the competitors, all mutations propagate. Both beneficial and deletrious mutations go forward. At some point so many deletrious mutations would have accumulated, other organisms that invested in the complex process of embryonic development wins. Much of the chapter explains how embryonic development keeps good mutations and keep out the bad mutations. Too much for me to paraphrase it here. Get the 30th anniversary edition of The Selfish Gene.
Comparing software to organisms might be a flawed analogy. But still how many software projects just grow too big to be effectively managed with so many bugs and patches and hacks and eventually some manage somewhere says, "enough, start from the scratch, and keep only the well proven procedures, subroutines and algorithms."? That is going back to embryonic development. IMHO.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact