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Simon Willison’s Weblog

Sitting nervously on the fence

Today’s hot topic is the Winer Watcher, Mark Pilgrim’s new tool that tracks and highlights edits made to Dave Winer’s Scripting News. The blogosphere is pretty much evenly split on this: some people think it is a blatant attack on Dave Winer, tantamount o blogger bullying, while others see it as a neat technical solution to a very real problem.

I’ve been using Technorati to follow the discussion, but the real action is in the comments attached to this entry by Don Park. To save you having to read all 80+ comments, here are some highlights (I’ve tried to pick out entries which represent the different opinions on display). Please note that by the very nature of this post I am quoting these people out of context. If that makes you uncomfortable, read the whole thread.

Már Örlygsson

IMO Mark is acting like a school-yard bully, picking on someone he feels will make him look big. Hrrmphf! (Surely Mark has every right to dislike Dave—or anyone else for that matter—but constantly picking on people is just plain nasty and can have terrible psychological effects on even the strongest people.)

Greg Ritter

There’s editing posts and then there’s what I call “de-publishing.” http://www.tenreasonswhy.com/weblog/archives/2003/07/10/the_ethics_of_depublishing.html

De-publishing is when an author deletes or substantively changes a post without any sort of retraction or notice that the change has taken place. Note that I’m talking about *substantive* changes -- not fixing grammer or spelling or text formatting, but changes that affect the meaning or impact of the post.

Winer regularly writes something inflammatory and then later tries to “erase” it from existence by de-publishing it. I disapprove of that because with publishing should come accountability.

Mark Pilgrim is using Winer’s RSS feeds to track the “virtual paper trail” to reveal the kind of de-publishing that takes place on Scripting News.

I find de-publishing far more unethical and detrimental to the blogosphere (especially when it comes from such a prominent blogger as Winer) than what Mark Pilgrim is doing.

Blake Winton

Am I the only person here who finds the Winer Watcher a fascinating look into the mind of a popular and experienced weblogger as he writes his posts? I read it compulsively, and find myself thinking “What changed there? Why did he rephrase that particular statement? How is the new phrasing better than the old?”.

Dave Winer

“there’s never a concept of a final posting”

Not true. 10PM is the final, that’s when the people who subscribe via email get their copy of Scripting.

BTW, I’ve deleted a few paragraphs as I’m writing this post. Think about it. Did I do something wrong? That’s how ridiculous this discussion is.

Mark Pilgrim

1. Diff-like highlighting of changes within posts is an incredibly useful feature that all news aggregators should support.

2. Dave’s bandwidth claim is bogus. Winer Watcher uses a system of distributed mirrors and never touches scripting.com directly. If WW ceased to exist, Dave’s bandwidth bill would change by precisely zero.

3. Dave’s copyright claim is bogus. Winer Watcher is no more infringing than these existing syndication services:

http://www.oreillynet.com/meerkat/?c=584&t=ALL http://newsisfree.com/sources/info/336/

[...]

For the record, Winer Watcher was started because Dave wrote a series of posts totally lashing out at Blogger, Movable Type, Google, Tim Bray, and myself, and then edited them within hours to erase all traces of his own slanderous flaming. This kind of slander is NOT ACCEPTABLE UNDER ANY CIRCUMSTANCES, and the fact that he seems to know this at some level and edits/deletes it later only makes it worse. WW tracks this kind of Orwellian rewriting of history and displays it. It would be more useful if it could distinguish between a relevant edit and a typo correction, but sometimes even a single word is relevant, so I don’t know how it could tell.

Bill Brown

Dave: you’re free to delete anything you want and do whatever you want on your blog. It’s not wrong, it’s just a pain in the ass for your regular readers. I might read in the morning and revisit by afternoon to a completely different page, one who’s mood and tone have changed thoroughly. I personally don’t like that because I’m hardly confident in my previous recollection -- it’s unsettling.

Mark Pilgrim

For the record, here is a Scripting News post he posted on July 8 2003 and subsequently deleted (but Winer Watcher caught it):

“”“ There’s more to the story, in re Mark’s control of the RSS validator. It seems people who accuse me of controlling RSS may have missed that Mark and Sam have actually been exerting silent control by changing key aspects of the validator, without telling anyone they were doing it. Mark’s flaming in this thread, which caught the attention of quite a few people as being extrordinarily mean, even for Mark, was in exactly the area he wouldn’t want you to look in the validator. I want to disclaim that I control RSS, folks, because since the RSS 2.0 spec was frozen, it was Mark and Sam that controlled it, not me. Ironically, no one knew. ”“”

Rogers Cadenhead

Regardless of the legality, though, it seems particularly ill-timed. If the Echo Project is going to move anyone beyond the intractable political fights over RSS, it’s counterproductive to find novel new ways to piss each other off.

The thread then devolves in to an argument about whether Mark’s tool is a copyright infringment or is protected by “fair use”, at which point I tuned out (there are good arguments either way on that one).

Having thought things over, I love the functionality of the tool (Dave’s edits have caught me out on more than one occasion) but I am uncomfortable with the way it is being used to attack Dave’s personality. Point 4 of Rebecca Blood’s guide to weblog ethics is worth reading here: editing entries is best avoided, and when they are edited they should be accompanied by an addendum. Weblogs are a personal medium, but that does not absolve people from responsibility for what they have written. My own policy is to clearly mark any alterations I make to posts (with the exception of spelling mistakes), and I usually avoid making any edits at all. Dave’s policy is to edit his blog “live” until 10pm. when the day’s entries become frozen. It is not so much this policy that is under fire as the scale of Dave’s edits, and the nature of the material he later deletes.

If Winer Watcher was available as a standalone tool, I would use it. As a public resource, it does feel a little below the belt.

Posted 11th July 2003 at 9:02 pm

This is Sitting nervously on the fence by Simon Willison, posted on 11th July 2003.

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34 comments

  1. The irony that you edited the post to fix an mis-escaping amuses me. I sometimes go back and fix spelling mistakes or something I felt was badly worded. I don't think I've ever intentionally changed the tone of a post. I have deleted a post because a few hours later it failed the "this could bite me in the ass later" test.

    My feeling is that blogs are a personal thing and people should feel free to treat it as their personal medium and edit to their heart's content. It's a personal choice. I do feel that in this case Mark has stepped over the line that seperates frequent visitors from stalkers.

    Gavin Estey - 11th July 2003 21:22 - #

  2. Regarding that "slanderous flame", the following thread over at the SSF-DEV mailing list makes it pretty clear that the validator *did* flag perfectly valid RSS 2.0 feeds as invalid (and still does, as far as I can tell), it *did* recommend people to remove core elements in such cases, and the validator behaviour *has* been changed recently:

    http://groups.yahoo.com/group/ssf-dev/message/17
    Rogers Cadenhead: This feed does not validate as RSS.
    http://groups.yahoo.com/group/ssf-dev/message/18
    Sam Ruby: Thanks. Fixed.

    (you can use your favourite HTTP tool to verify that the page they're talking about really was changed on July 3, despite the fact that it still says "last updated on October 19". everyone's lying, as usual...)

    Fredrik Lundh - 11th July 2003 23:16 - #

  3. Fredrik,

    Not commenting on any of the other stuff, but using HTTP to check when a document was last updated is useless. It tells you when the object at that URL was last modified, not the document itself. There can be all sorts of reasons for the object to be updated, but the document staying the same - changing to a different server, moving from php to plain html, including a different footer, etc, etc. I'm not disputing that the validator has changed (I really don't know or care), it's just that holding up a HTTP header as some sort of "proof" is a bit useless.

    Jim - 11th July 2003 23:52 - #

  4. Fredrik: the issue appears to have been fixed in that the validator no longer recommends teh removal of the source element, but instead recommends the removal of "one of the duplicate elements". I agree that it would be preferable for it to recommend the removal of dc:source - the whole funky thing was a complete farce, but the core point (ocne it finally came out) that RSS 2.0 core elements should be favoured over equivalent extensions makes perfect sense to me. That said, the current wording is acceptable if a general consensus within the RSS community has not been reached on the matter.

    I do however agree that an announcement on the validator blog about this change would be a good idea; with something as politically charged as RSS stuff like that is definitely best out in the open. If that's all there is to it I think Dave is over-reacting a bit. Still, full disclosure would be a bery good thing.

    Simon Willison - 12th July 2003 00:07 - #

  5. using HTTP to check when a document was last updated is useless

    Sure, but when the HTTP header for one document says "July 3, 2003" and the header for all the others say "October 2002", you might suspect that something happened that day... (the reason I added that note was to avoid the obligatory "but the page says" response).

    Dave is over-reacting a bit

    Sure, but so is Mark. Comes with the syndication territory, I suppose. Too many fanatics, not enough humor.

    Fredrik Lundh - 12th July 2003 00:26 - #

  6. Give it a rest, Fredrik. The "last modified" statement is manually maintained; it was a limitation of Movable Type when we set up the site. (We should install Kevin's excellent LastModified plugin for MT, but we haven't yet.)

    Mark - 12th July 2003 01:09 - #

  7. Besides showing that your sense of humour is seriously broken, what's your point?

    Fredrik Lundh - 12th July 2003 01:15 - #

  8. And for the last time, Fredrik, the spec has absolutely nothing to say about the case where a feed contains two elements that mean the same thing. We had been around and around on this issue, and no one could tell us what to do, so we made a judgement call. Don't like it? Tough. We were operating in a vacuum; as far as we could tell, we were the only 2 people in the world who gave a shit. I didn't see anyone else even bothering enough to care until a few weeks ago. Once SSF-DEV set themselves up as the group who cared about this sort of RSS minutia, we immediately deferred to their judgement. Thank God *someone* cares; I don't see the spec author giving a rat's ass about any of this. I hope they clarify the rest of the manure that is the RSS spec; the validator will be the first beneficiary of their efforts, I promise you. How this translates into Dave's outrageous claims that we were "stealing RSS" from him is anyone's guess.

    Mark - 12th July 2003 01:15 - #

  9. "And for the last time, Fredrik, the spec has absolutely nothing to say about the case where a feed contains two elements that mean the same thing." It's not about specifications, it's about experience and best practices. RSS is a file format for data interchange, and the same rules apply here as for all other interchange formats. I suggest reading up on the history of TIFF; lot's of lessons to learn for anyone interested in file format design and evolution. Nothing new here.

    Fredrik Lundh - 12th July 2003 01:25 - #

  10. If not for specs then how is interop supposed to stablize? How are users supposed to be spare the torment as developers that don't understand the nuances of the technology argue over ambiguities. Or, worse yet, engage in misdirection arguments because their tools are too weak to effectively implement what's in the spec.

    So you're saying instead of open interop things should continue to wallow in the mire like TIFF suffered? There's an old saying, "don't piss on me and tell me it's raining". Likewise don't try it while extolling the virtues of selling me an umbrella. How about just not pissing on the users in the first place?

    Why otherwise smart people continue to be fooled by Winer's lies is nothing short of incredible. But then again, they liked Mussolini and Hitler too. Until the brownshirts and ovens of course.

    anonymous - 12th July 2003 02:37 - #

  11. "RSS, The TIFF of a new generation." Your're right, that sums it up nicely.

    joe - 12th July 2003 05:36 - #

  12. I have the impression that a lot of manipulation is going on from the part of Mark. By writing the RSS validator and by providing an MT template for RSS 2.0 that just generated a dc:date element, he had a lot of influence over what was regarded as valid RSS and what not. An RSS feed with both pubDate and dc:date is still marked as invalid, while a Necho feed with both issued and dc:date is marked as valid. On what grounds does the validator make this check, it can hardly know all namespaces and know which elements might be duplicates. The RSS validator in combination with aggregators that only accept either pubDate or dc:date is forcing people to make a choice between the two, while it would be perfectly acceptable to generate both, and it clearly is contrary to common practice to replace existing elements by extensions.

    Curioso - 12th July 2003 10:22 - #

  13. I have the impression that a lot of manipulation is going on from the part of Mark. By writing the RSS validator and by providing an MT template for RSS 2.0 that just generated a dc:date element, he had a lot of influence over what was regarded as valid RSS and what not.

    Mark was by no means the only person who could provide an MT template or a validator. In fact, there was (is?) a userland "validator" that is shockingly useless in that it can't even do basic XML processing.

    On what grounds does the validator make this check, it can hardly know all namespaces and know which elements might be duplicates.

    Just because the validator doesn't know about all namespaces, it doesn't mean that it can't flag common errors for the namespaces it does know about (although I think that feeds should still be marked valid with a warning message in this case; this isn't strictly validation but linting - validation has a specific meaning within XML).

    The RSS validator in combination with aggregators that only accept either pubDate or dc:date is forcing people to make a choice between the two, while it would be perfectly acceptable to generate both

    Not according to Dave Winer

    and it clearly is contrary to common practice to replace existing elements by extensions.

    ...and it clearly is contrary to common practice to define said elements in the specification when you can define elements in terms of an existing specification (in other words: pubDate should have been deprecated, and the RSS 2.0 specifcation mandated the use of dc:date).

    Jim - 12th July 2003 10:34 - #

  14. ...and it clearly is contrary to common practice to define said elements in the specification when you can define elements in terms of an existing specification This is nonsense, there are just too many specifications to choose from for adding elements. Why not check for rfc822:date, this specification clearly predates dc:date. Following the above reasoning, Necho should also use dc:date or dcterms:issued, etc.

    Curioso - 12th July 2003 10:59 - #

  15. Jim: I don't see anything in the RSS 2.0 spec that mandates the use of dc:date or suggests that namespace elements should ever supercede core elements. http://backend.userland.com/rss

    Rogers Cadenhead - 12th July 2003 12:21 - #

  16. Curioso,

    The shortcomings of RFC822 dates have already been discussed elsewhere and are well known, I won't bother going into them here. Furthermore, there is no existing rfc822 namespace or xml application. I realise that there are lots of existing specifications, but the dublin core is an established way of providing metadata to documents like this, and yes, I think necho should take advantage of this.

    Rogers,

    I'm not sure what your point is - I was saying that this is a shortcoming of the RSS 2.0 specification imho, not that it is in there.

    Jim - 12th July 2003 13:13 - #

  17. One of the givens of RSS 0.9x/2.0 is zero breakage, so it's likely that nothing will ever be deprecated. In many ways this is a plus -- an implementor who writes code to parse RFC 822 dates (which is pretty easy in most languages) can read PUBDATE and doesn't have to deal with the issue again simply because some other namespace has a better way of representing timestamps. At the time the first RSS was released, did the Dublin Core element set even exist? Version 1.0 is from 1998.

    Rogers Cadenhead - 12th July 2003 13:20 - #

  18. It's not only likely that nothing will ever be deprecated, it's a certainty. RSS 2.0 is a dead end, it even says so in the specification:

    ...the RSS spec is, for all practical purposes, frozen at version 2.0.1.

    Keeping elements around because they were there in the beginning is stupid. Even HTML has thrown away some elements over the years, and the user-base of HTML is far, far in excess of any kind of RSS. I'm not saying that the specification should forbid pubDate and anybody supporting it is stupid, I'm saying that dc should have been included in a later RSS specification, 2.0 would have been ideal. pubDate could have been marked as deprecated (i.e. clients support it, generators switch to dc when the majority of client support dc), and *then* it could have been removed. Deprecation isn't rocket science, and it's not a new thing.

    Jim - 12th July 2003 14:40 - #

  19. The RSS 2.0 specification written by UserLand Software is frozen, but as it states, the format itself is in the public domain. UserLand can't freeze RSS. Personally, I'd prefer deprecation in RSS 0.9x/2.0 also for some elements. But there's some merit in leaving RSS as it is, warts and all, and letting Echo meet the needs of people who need more from a syndication format. It's shaping up to be another XML-RPC vs. SOAP issue. Having the choice between those formats is a good thing.

    Rogers Cadenhead - 12th July 2003 15:13 - #

  20. I am unaware of any serious shortcomings of RFC822 dates, they are used in E-mail, News, and HTTP headers, and clearly work there. There is no reason to replace something if it is not broken. Or should we also replace these other formats and upgrade our e-mail clients, news readers, and browsers?

    But my main point is that Mark and Sam have been pushing their own version of RSS 2.0 through the validator and the example feeds that they are providing. Their intention is still clear in the use of UseDCDate in today's version of the validator's Python code that detects simultaneous occurrence of pubDate and dc:date. This is also a step backwards, because pubDate requires a full date/time specification, while dc:date allows you to just specify a year,

    Curioso - 12th July 2003 16:33 - #

  21. Item-level pubDate was *new* in RSS 2.0. Previous versions of the RSS 0.9x branch DID NOT HAVE IT. It was introduced at THE EXACT SAME TIME as namespaces (and therefore the ability to use Dublin Core), and it was therefore COMPLETELY SUPERFLUOUS.

    We tried to explain this to Dave at the time but he was completely ignorant of namespaces (except that people were asking for them -- he didn't even know how to create one! and his software certainly didn't handle them properly (a problem which Jake has since rectified, not Dave)) and he was completely ignorant of Dublin Core. If he had heard of it at all, it was in the context of RSS 1.0 and RDF, i.e. the boogeyman. He had absolutely no clue that adding namespaces meant that this edge case (of the same thing being expressed two different ways) could be a problem.

    We asked him to deprecate existing core elements (not take them out entirely, just formally suggest that they not be used anymore), but he has this weird definition of evolvability and backward compatibility that precludes any hint of deprecation of any kind. (And then he complains when people complain that RSS is too hard to implement on the client side. Hello, these are related concepts.)

    As for "well, I had influence because I made the MT template". Yes, I had influence, yes I made the MT template. All of my design decisions were PUBLICLY DOCUMENTED at the time. I didn't see anyone else bothering to make an MT template at the time. Dave even pointed to that entry and praised it for (a) supporting RSS 2.0, and (b) supporting guids, which were his baby.

    (A side note: the template in that entry actually now redirects to the copy on feeds.archive.org, because when we made the validator, we made posted sample templates there based on my previous work, and then I later accidentally deleted it from my site, and people noticed and complained, so I set up the redirect.)

    Everything you believe about the validator being evil, and this template being evil, and all of my intentions being evil: IT IS ALL A PRODUCT OF DAVE'S RECENT "FUNKY RSS" FUD-SLINGING. Absolutely nowhere in the spec does it say "you can use namespaces except where it conflicts with core elements". Fredrik would say "well it's obvious that you shouldn't do that". Well, fuck you and your sense of what's obvious, Fredrik; I publicly documented my decisions at the time, and Dave and a lot of other people read them and linked to them at the time, and I didn't hear any complaints until Dave suddenly decided -- all by himself, and only quite recently -- that all my work on RSS 2.0 was shit.

    I am soooo done with RSS, and people have the gall to wonder why...

    Mark - 12th July 2003 17:38 - #

  22. I'm one of the people who raised the issue of the precedence of namespaced elements vs. optional core elements with Dave last september, when the 2.0 spec was being prematurely rushed to finalization after the addition of namespaces. Dave told me that he thought that the optional core elements should have precedence, but didn't add any such guidance into the spec, because it had already been frozen, and none of the aggregators used the namespaced elements anyway.

    Michael Bernstein - 12th July 2003 19:20 - #

  23. re: "None of the aggregators used the namespaced elements anyway."

    This is crap, and it's an excellent example of how vendor's assumptions make their way into vendor-controlled specifications. At least with a community process there's a *chance* that rational thought can prevail. Just because *Dave's* products didn't support namespaces doesn't mean no one did. (FYI: Radio now supports namespaces properly. Jake wrote a real namespace-aware XML parser. Dave still doesn't understand them, as evidenced by his recent laments that Pie use a different name for the top-level element. Completely misses the fact that the entire thing is in a namespace, so any XML parser wouldn't be confused at all. In other words, he doesn't understand the difference between a fully qualified name and a local name. And, until Jake fixed it, neither did his products, as evidenced by Simon's RSS namespace test suite. Is this the man you want defining *your* XML standards?)

    Other random tidbits: RSS 1.0 was in 2000, not 1998, and Dublin Core was one of the first standard modules defined at the same time as the core RSS 1.0 specification. I believe (someone correct me if I'm wrong here) that RSS 1.0 was one of the first uses of Dublin Core in RDF.

    You may be thinking of RSS 0.90 or 0.91, both defined solely by Netscape in 1999 (0.90 in March, 0.91 in July). Neither used or allowed namespaces.

    Mark - 12th July 2003 19:49 - #

  24. Hello. I won’t bring anything to the topic, but does anybody have any idea why doesn’t this entry appear in SharpReader (my aggregator of choice)? I can see all other entries, I can see this one when I look at the feed in Firebird, I just can’t see it in SharpReader. Strange.

    Shot - 12th July 2003 20:55 - #

  25. Now, as I look at it, it might be because of the first quote, which is displayed to my Firebird as being quoted from „M�r �rlygsson”. There’s a chance that SharpReader is choking on the unknown (wrongly encoded?) characters.

    Shot - 12th July 2003 21:02 - #

  26. re: "None of the aggregators used the namespaced elements anyway." I just re-reviewed my correspondence with Dave, and I may have been a bit unfair. Some of the context is missing, but he may have been referring (as far as this is concerned) to the DC equivalent of [title], which, while optional, predates the DC element, and for which I don't think there was support in any aggregator (is there now?). It may not have been fair of me to conflate this with the rest of our conversation at the time.

    Michael Bernstein - 12th July 2003 21:05 - #

  27. Doesn't Mark's "fuck you, Frederik" comment break two of the three rules he imposes on his own weblog's comments? Pilgrim, moderate thyself.

    James Kew - 12th July 2003 23:48 - #

  28. My take on the whole matter. Let's just get back to business.

    Paul Scrivens - 13th July 2003 04:20 - #

  29. "he was completely ignorant of namespaces" I beg your pardon. Where did you ever get that idea Mark. Listen up, other people cared about RSS, other than you and Sam, so stop saying you were the only ones. If that's your fig leaf Mark, it doesn't work. Sam *did* make a change to your validator, contradicting what you've said elsewhere. Just set the record straight Mark and let's move on, and stop throwing the insults around. Enough already.

    Dave Winer - 14th July 2003 00:43 - #

  30. Paul, I want to know what's going on with the validator. I've been promoting it, pointing people to it, and I think I have a right to know what it does. I also don't like the way he addresses me and other people, but I'm letting that slide.

    Dave Winer - 14th July 2003 00:47 - #

  31. Dave, I do not think the validator has been changed at all (except for adding Necho support, that is). On the validator site, the pages explaining the error message for duplicate elements have been updated, apparently on July 3. Earlier these pages told you to replace the existing RSS 2.0 element by the Dublin Core element, now they just tell you to remove one of the duplicate elements. This is not a change in the validator itself.

    It is clear that Mark has been consistently pushing for use of the Dublin Core elements instead of the optional RSS 2.0 elements. He does not say so explicitly in his public documentation of his MT template, you have to concluded this from him not mentioning any of these optional elements, and you can view source on the MT template to see what he is actually doing. The same for the validator, the code is public, and you can view source to see what is going on exactly.

    So Dave, what other statements from Mark do you want?

    Curioso - 14th July 2003 10:18 - #

  32. You know guys, I could give a fig over this religious war (and they call ME a slathering zealot).

    RSS? namespaces? Hey as long as it works with whatever's on the CPAN or cool tools like MagPieRSS, whatta I care?

    What Dave said, and then didn't say? BFD. I mean it might be important if I read his column every day, but I've got a life outside blogging that trumps this stuff.

    What Mark is doing? Well, I understand his frustration, but man-o-man, could I go for another 40-day discourse like the one he lit-up the blogsphere with last summer.

    Tell you what. I live here near D.C - neutral ground. My brother is a former state champion wrestler. Let's get'm both to grapple for three regulation rounds (olympic stuff, not the made-for-TV crapola). Whomever loses pays for dinner. I'll cover the cost of coffee & desert afterwards.

    In other words - gentlemen, life's too short and both of you are too talented - or as my father would say when my younger brother and I were beating each other's brains out:

    "I don't care who's fault it is, I'll knock both your heads together ..."

    Mean Dean - 15th July 2003 22:32 - #

  33. Whoo-hoo! I got a shout-out!

    And now on to the serious portion of this comment: I've done a couple of searches on "the history of TIFF", but couldn't find anything that resembled the current RSS kafuffle. Can someone please supply a couple of urls that point me at what Fredrik and Joe are talking about?

    Also, Simon, would you consider allowing <br> tags, so that I can insert newlines into the comment at places I want to?

    Thanks, Blake.

    Blake Winton - 18th July 2003 19:50 - #

  34. Simon: I'm just about done writing my own weblog software and one of the features I added seems to solve the bigger issue that Mark and Dave have and that's changes in content. I need to flush it out a bit more, but a rough idea of what I am doing is here: http://david.ulevitch.com/article/2003/7/30/8. The idea is a basic sort of revision control. [See the "Diff to original" link on the bottom left of the article.] My code allows me to "ignore" a revision if an update is just for a spelling change for instance instead of major change. I have a writeup of why it is important and why it is good for permalinks to be able to diff to original's almost finished.

    Thanks,

    davidu

    David A. Ulevitch - 6th August 2003 13:38 - #

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