--- Bob Wyman <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > I don't believe that it is appropriate to trash > Microsoft, or any > other vendor, in this fashion in this forum. It does > not contribute to our > goal of having a reasoned discussion of the issues. > > As far as Dare's arguments go, he says: "I'm saying > that at present > the Atom adds fragmentation to the world of XML > syndication for little or no > benefit." Well, I can assure you that I do see great > benefit from Atom over > RSS today. Our experience is that Atom feeds are > much cleaner, easier to > parse, and much more consistent in encoding from > site to site than RSS feeds > are. Reading RSS feeds is more of an art than a > science. There are so many > flavors of RSS that it's hard to claim that the code > you need to read RSS is > a "parser" -- it is more like a heuristic hint > processor. i.e. A fancy > guessing machine...
If Atom was going to be the first or even the second XML syndication format on the block I'd probably share your sentiments. However as for your statements that Atom feeds are in general of higher quality than RSS feeds, I'll direct you to an excerpt from a post made by Bjarne Stroustrup a few years ago[0]. "When C++ was new, one of the things that pleased me most was that discussions about C++ were so much better informed than discussions about most other languages, that the understanding of key concepts were so much better in C++ groups than in, say, C and Pascal groups, and that groups such as comp.lang.c++ were so much more polite and supportive than that of other groups. Clearly, I thought naively, C++ attracts a much better class of programmers, learning C++ helps people to absorb the key concepts of good programming/design, and the resulting success makes people more tolerant and helpful. I was wrong. The phenomenon was real, but it had little to do with C++. In a small dedicated community, life is relatively easy. people do their homework, people have access to reasonable sources of information, gross errors and misconceptions are corrected before they can cause significant harm, compilers and teaching materials are up-to-date, etc. This is not and cannot be the case in a multi-hundred-thousand member community: Some will be taught out of outdated or unsuitable books, some will use antiquated compilers and tools, some will be taught by charlatans, some will be remote from current and reliable news-sources, some will have unsuitable rules and regulations imposed on their work, etc. Also, in a rapidly growing community, most users will be novices." RSS feeds are basically mainstream and are being generated by orders of magnitude more people than are generating Atom feeds many of whom aren't XML syndication geeks. This accounts more for the issues with quality of the feeds than the whether the incomplete and ambiguously defined Atom 0.3 spec is of any higher quality than the RSS 0.91, 1.0 or 2.0 specs. [0] http://www.research.att.com/~bs/blast.html ===== THINGS TO DO IF I BECOME AN EVIL OVERLORD #222 I reserve the right to execute any henchmen who appear to be a little too intelligent, powerful, or devious. However if I do so, I will not at some subsequent point shout "Why am I surrounded by these incompetent fools?!" __________________________________ Do you Yahoo!? Check out the new Yahoo! Front Page. www.yahoo.com
