I've written 21 computer books in the past decade, documenting thousands of subjects in tree-killing detail. One of my pet peeves as a technical writer is covering something that readers are unlikely to need and should never, ever use, like the discussion board component in FrontPage 2000. I devoted an entire chapter to it in Sams Teach Yourself Microsoft FrontPage 2000 in 24 Hours, a mistake I rectified in subsequent editions.
(Buy a copy of the book on Amazon.Com for 92 cents!)
FrontPage 2000 supported discussion boards with FrontPage Server Extensions and a bland web site template that used frames, as you can see on this Pot Bellied Pigs forum. I can't find a single publisher running a discussion board successfully with this software.
I was reminded of this when I wrote the draft RSS specification and had to cover the textInput element.
Nobody uses textInput, even though it has been a part of RSS since the first version was published by Dan Libby in 1999. Aggregators don't support it and RSS publishers don't include one in their feeds.
Because I had to document it anyway, I decided that at least one person should support it.
I included textInput in all of my RSS feeds for the past two months, using the element to ask the question, "Your aggregator supports the textInput element. What software are you using?" I also wrote a PHP script to collect input from anyone who answered this question.
I had to take textInput out of my feeds because its title was being interpreted as the feed's title, causing My Yahoo and other RSS software to change the name of my weblog from Workbench to TextInput Inquiry.
Before I removed it, two RSS aggregators were found that take textInput: James Robertson's BottomFeeder and the Liferea aggregator for Linux.
In BottomFeeder, any feed that has a textInput element includes a right-click menu command: . Choosing the command opens a dialog box that demonstrates Robertson is either extremely detail-oriented or couldn't resist implementing the most useless feature in RSS.
