Simon Willison’s Weblog

Hehe RSS3

Forget about RSS 0.9x, RSS 1.0 and RSS 2.0, Aaron Schwartz has released a spec for RSS 3.0 :)

There’s been a lot of talk in the community about how RSS 2.0 is too complicated. I haven’t heard any objections, so I’m going to move ahead with the following changes that will result in RSS 3.0.

1. Remove XML. XML is just too complicated and is against the spirit of RSS, which is Really Simple Syndication. I don’t want people to have to buy one of these 200 page XML books to understand RSS. And XML sucks up bandwidth like nobody’s business. Instead, we’ll go back to RFC822-style fields. There are lots of available parsers for those.

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3. HTML forbidden. No one needs HTML. Email has been just fine for years before Microsoft introduce their stupid rich HTML extensions. HTML is for those loser newbies. Any intelligent Internet user deals in plain text.

Best of all, it can be parsed using a Python one-liner.