-...
+www-archive
On Thu, 19 Feb 2009 12:40:07 +0100, Sam Ruby <[email protected]>
wrote:
This problem is way worse with title, there the specs and consumers
(mostly) agree that it is plain text, yet the producers (mostly) agree
that it is entity encoded HTML. That's why you might see things like
AT&T in headlines.
The only way forward in situations like this is to start over with a new
format. People will never stop using RSS, but people who have a need
for the problems that Atom fixes will migrate. And consumers will
support both.
I think RSS5 could have worked actually given that consumers presumably
have some interoperability or can get aligned because of the feeds already
deployed. It was mostly for political reasons that such an approach was
abandoned though presumably also because it's less hassle to simply start
over and leave the mess to implementors. (See also design motivations for
e.g. XForms.)
Fortunately RSS/Atom is a rather simple problem space. (I read up on all
the history, blog posts et cetera, but still, it's rather simple; no
layout, DOM, etc.) Therefore having several different formats is not much
of a hassle. (Then again, Google Reader still does not support Atom ID or
handles redirects properly, etc.)
I also think that Atom only marginally improved things. It defined
handling of the supposed problems with RSS quite ok (though complex). E.g.
embedding HTML. However, requirements on how to handle invalid input
(apart from XML layer errors) are missing.
--
Anne van Kesteren
http://annevankesteren.nl/
