[
Lists Home |
Date Index |
Thread Index
]
>
>
> I'm asking this honestly -- I don't really have any problem with Atom,
> but I have always felt that the business decision-makers feel that "if
> it's not broke, don't fix it". And RSS's "brokenness" seems to be
> something of concern only to techies right now...
>
As best as I understand from watching the food fight from a distance,
there's no dispute that RSS works fine in the current world where the
content is almost all human-readable and the parsing is extremely
liberal. The question is whether this success will continue once
serious businesspeople get into the act, when real money is at stake,
when lots of people start syndicating information that is mostly
processed by machines (calendars and schedules data that would be
pulled from a feed into Outlook, perhaps, or financial information that
might be acted on by some sort of 'bot), and as people want to move
away from liberal parsing towards content format contracts. The
"simplicity" of the RSS specs looks like underspecification to someone
who wants to be able to reject/ignore a message if it does not meet a
rigorous understanding of what information is there and how to find it.
Or to put it another way, if the people who do this for a living (or as
a serious hobby) can't agree on what a "valid" weblog update is, how
can one expect them to agree on what a valid bit of financial news or a
valid meeting request is? The current system manages to hang together
with lots of back-channel communication, and works well so long as the
worst that can happen is one doesn't see that Joe Blow updated his
weblog. It's not so clear that the current way of doing things is
successful when real money is on the table or if serious players start
processing thousands of RSS/Atom items per second. I'm not sure if
having a more rigorous definition of validity and insisting on real XML
parsing will fix these next-generation problems, but it sure seems like
a useful first step to anyone steeped in XML best practice.
The obvious alternative of turning RSS into a rigorously defined spec
seems to have been rejected because of the desire to get out of the
food fight, not because of any technical reason.
|
