On Thursday, January 13, 2005, at 01:51 PM, Graham wrote:
On 13 Jan 2005, at 6:36 pm, Tim Bray wrote:The objections to this fall into two forms:
1. We don't have prior art in the syndication space that proves this is needed.
2. This is someone else's problem, e.g. SOAP
3. We don't need it
That's #1 above
and it won't be implemented anywhereGiven the utter simplicity of implementation, I think it will be implemented in many clients. If no publisher ever uses it, then that's very little loss. (However, I don't expect it to be implemented universally. How serious a problem will that be? ) If people make extensions and use Atom for uses that they wouldn't have lacking mU, then that could be a significant gain--we'll see.
and it's extremely open to abuseCould you explain? Do you mean that people who don't implement support for certain extensions will feel abused? If so, here's why I don't think <mU> makes the situation any worse--if anything it makes it better:
If a significant number of feeds, or if significant feeds, use an extension that really IS important to understand in order to process the feed in a non-bad way, clients that don't support it will get complaints whether they ignore it (no <mU>) or report that they can't process it (with <mU>). If they report that they can't process it, the complaints will be along the lines of "I need to access this feed! Please add support (or I'll get a new feed reader)!" If they ignore it, the complaints will be "This feed doesn't show up properly! Fix it (or I'll get a new feed reader)!" and "Your feed reader is causing problems with my system because it's partially processing my feed, but it isn't doing XYZ with extension ABC! Fix it you lazy, stinking, system-wrecking hacker!"
If the problem is a significant number of feeds, or significant feeds, marking something mU when it really doesn't hurt to not understand it, then yes, developers will get unnecessary complaints. That could lead to:
A) More extensions being supported by more applications
B) Applications with the user-option to ignore mU (hopefully on a feed-by-feed and/or extension-by-extension basis)
C) Developers complaining to publishers
D) Developers publicly criticizing publishers
E) Developers telling their customers to complain to publishers
F) A few customers actually doing so
G) Some publishers getting their act together
A little pain, sure. But how likely is it that the problems will outweigh the benefits? We don't have prior experience to gauge either by. I think the potential for pain is small enough to make the experiment worth the risk.
and it's extremely open to failure.
Could you explain?
