Re: RSS 1.1

On Wed, Jan 19, 2005 at 02:01:07PM -0800, Kevin A. Burton wrote:
> 
> Sean B. Palmer wrote:
> 
> >On behalf of an independent group of RSS 1.0 users, I'm pleased to
> >announce the following specification and toolset for the consideration
> >of RSS-Dev WG members and interested mailing list participants:
> >
> >    http://inamidst.com/rss1.1/
> >    - RSS 1.1 Specification
> >
> >  
> >
> I didn't have time to review the spec last night... was very busy.
> 
> Right off the bat I'm really -1 to this whole thing. There's no way that 
> any of the existing RSS parsers will be able to support this.  

Although I understand what you're saying with this statement, I would like
to point out that some aggregators do support RSS 1.1 with no changes:
specifically, Blam!, which uses RSS.Net for parsing, supports RSS 1.1
feeds with no changes at all.

> If its 
> RSS 1.1 it should be backwards compatible at a MINIMUM with RSS 1.0.  
> An 
> RSS 1.0 parser should be able to parse RSS 1.1 or call it something 
> else. RSS 3.0 ....

RSS 3.0 is already taken, although in jest, by two different 
specifications: Aaron Swartz's 3.0[1] and Dan Brickley's RSS 3.0, which
was at http://groups.yahoo.com/group/rss3 but seems to have been wiped
from the servers at some point. (The original message is still 
available[2], however.) To use this name would confuse the syndication 
issue even more than it already is, a problem which no one wants to
encourage, least of all Sean or I.

> As an implementor I'll have to go through a lot of trouble to support 
> RSS 1.1 and I don't want to do it... Its not necessary. 

And that's acceptable. We've outlined the Specification for review
by the community: that does not mean in any way that people are
required to implement it. There are probably no aggregators out there
which handle every format that there is, and that's not a problem: if
people want to use a specific type of feed, they will use a tool which
supports it. Does it create somewhat of a mess? Yes, unfortunately,
but these things happen, and life goes on.

RSS 1.1 is not designed to force tool designers to do anything: our 
goal was not to create a competitor to any syndication format. It was
primarily designed to fill the need for an improved version of RSS 1.0.
Given the relatively small differences between RSS 1.0 and RSS 1.1, I
disagree that it is a complete revolution from RSS 1.0. 

Most RSS 1.0-friendly aggregators will still have problems aggregating
RSS 0.9. There is no change small enough that you can maintain complete
backwards compatibility in all tools: We strove instead to make it
relatively simple for implementors to implement the changes we did choose
to make. Given the fact that there are already multiple aggregators which 
support RSS 1.1, I think that we did relatively well in that goal.

I'm sorry that you feel it's not worth your time as an implementor to
support RSS 1.1, but I respect that decision. I hope that as further
discussion occurs, you may change your mind.

[1] http://aaronsw.com/2002/rss30
[2] http://groups.yahoo.com/group/rss-dev/message/2076

Regards,

-- 
Christopher Schmidt



 
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