Henri Sivonen wrote:
On Feb 19, 2009, at 15:45, Sam Ruby wrote:
Henri Sivonen wrote:
On Feb 19, 2009, at 13:56, Anne van Kesteren wrote:
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.)
FWIW, I agree. In retrospect, I think we should have done RSS5
despite the objections of the steward of RSS. Having Atom didn't help
feed consumer apps that still need to sort out the RSS <title>
disaster when RSS is served to them.
/me mutters "Monday Morning Quarterbacks"[1].
My point is not criticizing what happened after the fact for the sake of
whining with hindsight. I was in it myself, and I even believed in
Draconian error handling back then and was terrified by Mark's Liberal
Parser.
My point is the Atom response to the flaws of RSS probably isn't a
pattern that is good for emulation by other groups in the future as "the
only way forward".
"Only way forward" out of context sounds bad. I'll summarize the
original context thus: "to fix things that can't be fixed without an
incompatible change".
At the moment, the White House and the NFL both use Atom, even though
they call it RSS. Pretty much anything new written in Rails these days
uses Atom. You use Atom. Anne does too. Perhaps one day Ian will.
I'll make a note to check back in 5 years to see if, in hindsight, you
see things differently. :-P
- Sam Ruby
