Simon Willison’s Weblog

Bill Kearney responds

Bill Kearney posted this comment in response to yesterday’s semi-rant:

Sure, the trouble is getting the developers of the applications creating the RSS to stop being pigheaded. This is, unfortunately, a non-trivial matter. Several battles have been waged, to varying degrees of success. Fundamentally, there’s a faction that naively worries about ’readability’ of the XML. Then there’s a crowd that worries about the verbosity. Over in another corner is the ’but I want to theoretically be able to use mod_kitchensink in my RSS’. Meanwhile, vendor jockeying with proprietary, half-baked extensions keeps happening, over and over...

The fortunate thing is diversity. As more tools come online it becomes apparent that giving the users what they want often means switching tools. When one tool doesn’t cut it, the users switch. Witness the incredible growth of MovableType. It defaults to creating RSS-1.0 files and makes a lot of use of RDF (via trackbacks). The users never see the gritty details, they just see nice functionality and use it.

The other comments are well worth reading as well.