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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
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 It's a historical document and should reside at a permanent URI.
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
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
.. and I thought it was only Microsoft and Google that tried to "break the web" on purpose ....
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
Uh, if Microsoft could be held liable for bad design, their buildings would already have been burned to the ground, their women stampeded, their cattle raped, the ground sown with salt and the wells poisoned.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
(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
That's what the .invalid TLD is for, also defined in RFC 2606.
Bogtha Bogtha Bogtha
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.
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
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.
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?
http://www.google.com/search?q=%22Brand+Necrophil
You know, Microsoft's street address also says a lot about their mentality.
You need to put a certain DTD URI into your documents because they essentially act like "magic cookie" values in binary file formats. It's the only way to tell if you're supposed to treat a document as HTML 1.0, 2.0, 3.0, 4.01, XHTML, HTML strict, HTML transitional, whatever. That information isn't encoded in the DTD, so there's no way to identify a file format simply by pointing at a random location with the identical DTD.
The point of the URI is to act as an opaque identifier for a particular file format. Being able to fetch it is just a bonus, and a good programmer shouldn't rely on the resource being there at run time. URIs are used because the domain name system already delegates responsibility for namespaces; a different scheme could be used, but using DNS leverages the existing infrastructure. It's not perfect (as the RSS 0.91 example shows), but it works 90% of the time.
pi = any circle's circumference / diameter. At least on a Euclidean plane, anyway. It's a bit incorrect to think that the value of pi varies, as it's defined in a particular type of geometry. There are also purely mathematical ways to define the value of pi, independent of geometry. Still, the idea of measuring space to get the value of "pi" is a valid way to think about measuring the curvature of space.
Now, let's say space is curved, like a sphere. (Like, oh, the one we live on.) If you draw a circle, say, the circumference of the Earth (along the equator), and then try to measure the "diameter" on the sphere (over one of the poles), you'll find it's much larger than the actual diameter (straight through the planet's core), and hence the "value of pi" will be much different. (In fact, it'll be 2, give or take a few decimal places since the Earth isn't a perfect sphere.)
To create a "pi meter", you might think of a device consisting of a fiber optic loop, like in a laser ring gyro; you simply measure the amount of time it takes for light to go around to measure the circumference of the loop, as well as using another pulse to measure its diameter. If space curves (as indeed it does, although not in any way that's noticeable far from, say, a black hole), you'll find a discrepency between your measurement of circumference / diameter and the defined value of pi.
You could also do the same thing with a piece of string and a ruler, but it wouldn't be convenient enough to call it a "pi meter".
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
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."
No. This is the perfect example of why a URI is not necessarily supposed to be treated as a URL. http://my.netscape.com/publish/formats/rss-0.91.dt d is just a unique identifier for the RSS DTD. It used to also be hosted there as a convenience, but your software isn't supposed to rely on that.
http://outcampaign.org/
It would be returned for a refund.
Help stamp out iliturcy.