RE: [xml-dev] RSS beyond the Blog: 1992 or 1999? - was Re: [xml-dev] hurry GenX...

["Joshua Allen" <joshuaa@microsoft.com>]

> > I can already get my bank account and credit card information over
the 
> > Web using HTTP+SSL. So what is so crazy about my bank deciding to
give 
> > me the results as an XML document instead of an HTML one? All this 
> > talk of 80/20 solutions and bubbles confuses me.

>"aggregation" of information that is unique to me is a bit of a
misnomer, so I don't see the value of 
>leveraging the RSS+Aggregator infrastructure to do that.  Better to
build a real pub-sub network?

Well, I get an e-mail anytime someone accesses my credit files, and I
probably *wouldn't* want to get that via RSS.  However, it is very
appealing to me to have RSS feeds available that tell me whenever anyone
enters a new bug in the bug database against me, or whenever someone
checks in code changes to a tree that  I care about.  These capabilities
serve a real need, and are available today very simply using RSS.  And
in fact I would argue that RSS is superior, because I can modify the
scope of the delivered feed based on URL parameters (very RESTful).

Honestly, the talk about "*real* pub-sub network" reminds me of the
people in the early days of the Web who argued for a "*real* hypertext
network".  There were lots of *real* hypertext systems before the web,
and plenty since, but the web is vastly superior.