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David Megginson wrote:
> Those of us who don't belong to the rss-dev group would be grateful
> for a bit of history. What made you decide to make another RSS fork?
We're actually not thinking of this as a fork at all; there's neither
technical nor political motivation to do so. The aim from the beginning
has been simply to revise the work of the RSS-Dev WG, and to that end we
were careful to ensure that we contacted several of its members
privately before releasing--all of whom were enthusiastic about it.
It's true that we didn't decide to go through regular RSS-Dev WG
channels though, and there are several reasons for that:
* We wanted to produce and release a polished specification a) so that
we would have a very solid proposal to give to the RSS Dev WG and
community, rather than engaging ourselves in endless Atom-style
architectural discussions on the rss-dev mailing list (which may still
occur yet!); and b) so that the draft was in the equivalent of a W3C
Candidate Recommendation stage, where we're happy for people to
implement its contents.
* The RSS 1.1 specification was initially created in a period of
extremely rapid development, the like of which may not have been
possible, in our experience, in a larger group.
* We knew that RSS-Dev would be happy for another specification to be
developed since a number of recent comments had been made to look back
at the RSS 1.0 work, which is now nearly five years old, and revise it.
Nobody got around to doing this, however, because the group is mainly
defunct in its capacity as a specification producer, and exists merely
to host discussion surrounding clean-up and implementation issues.
So in other words, the route of initial "renegade-development" and then
a proposal to the wider group seemed to us to provide a much better cost
to benefit ratio, and was a natural consequence of development anyway.
> Is the rss-dev group responsible for RSS 1.x inactive or
> unresponsive, or are there some fundamental architectural
> disagreements?
We've tried to follow existing literature and debates about proposed
upgrades to RSS 1.0 as closely as possible in order to minimise this,
but as with designing any XML application, there are always going to be
people who fundamentally disagree about almost any feature. I'm glad
that Tim Bray is so heavily involved in Atom at the moment, for example,
so he won't notice that RSS 1.1 doesn't have a version attribute :-)
Again, though, there has been a private review period where we've
solicited the advice of various people engaged in RSS and XML work, and
we've been using that as a yardstick for how RSS 1.1 would be received.
We certainly wouldn't have gone ahead with the release if we thought
that the response would be unfavourable. We expect that there's a
significant likelihood, indeed, that the RSS Dev WG will support the
endeavour in full. The nature of today's proposal has simply been to ask
for that support: we had to start somewhere.
Many thanks for your enquiry David, and I hope I've satisfactorily
answered your questions.
--
Sean B. Palmer, http://inamidst.com/sbp/
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