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On 4/24/05, Bill de hÓra <bill.dehora@propylon.com> wrote:
> Probably pretty much any communications activity with third-parties that
> has normally been done (suboptimally) using email is candidate for
> re-architecting to a web style. Heck I bet somebody will end up running
> a photo business or a graphic design house on flickr some day.
>
What Dare actually said was "What Bosworth is pointing out is that the
Web is different from 'the enterprise'. XML technologies over the past
few years have been hijacked by enterprise concerns. It is telling
that XQuery is now primarily being driven by relational database
vendors and WS-* is basically taking on the use cases of
DCOM/CORBA/etc for the Enterprise. These may all be the right
solutions on the intranet or within the firewall (maybe) but they are
too complex for the worse-is-better world that is the Web.Using RSS as
the primary data format for the Web (in the same way HTML is the
primary document format) isn't as crazy as it sounds."
Which part of that do you disagree with, Bill?
Bosworth's point was that the Web is built out of simple and sloppy
standardized stuff that scales. Dare thinks that RSS appears to meet
enough of these criteria such that it's not as crazy as it sounds to
think of it as "HTML for Data". The part I'm most skeptical about is
"standardization" -- how will people agree on on tags, microformats,
namespaces, etc. whatever needed to extend RSS to cover restaurant
reviews, product catalogs, etc. etc. etc.?
The obvious answer is that what Google (especially Froogle) looks for
in markup, Father Darwin will deliver. Google seems to be pretty
cagey about what Froogle wants to see, but (sooo-prise soo-prise
soo-PRISE) there is already a cottage industry wanting to help you
with Froogle optimization. cf.
http://www.subiainteractive.com/froogle-prep.html If online stores
and services that play by the explicit or implicit rules of the "HTML
for Data" format, they will get more customers than those who don't.
If MSN and Yahoo understand and play by the same rules as Google, it's
hard to imagine what would stop this thing.
The obvious counter-argument is that it's RSS we're talking about here
:-) Religious wars over minutiae seem the order of the day. Not to
mention the fact that IP could rear its ugly little head here -- if
Yahoo and Google start suing each other over "their" RSS extensions,
it's all over. I guess I'm coming around to Dare's point of view --
this sounded absurd to me a couple of days ago, but now I can easily
imagine this coming into being as long as it doesn't get derailed by
what Dogbert calls the strongest force in the universe.
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