Rss

Final Push on the RSS Profile

I published a new draft today of the RSS Profile, a set of recommendations for how to best implement and support RSS. This profile will be proposed to the RSS Advisory Board for its approval on Aug. 28. The profile is four months in the making and could be proposed today, but I'd like to hammer on it for four more weeks. I think it has the potential to become the second-most popular reference document in RSS. ... (read more)

2006/07/27

Jason Douglas Joins RSS Advisory Board

Jason Douglas, the project lead on the RSS Platform at Yahoo and the cocreator of Channel Definition Format, has joined the RSS Advisory Board. The board now has members from Google, Microsoft and Yahoo. If we can find a member from Apple's RSS team, we'll be in an even better position to help the big companies and enterpreneurial companies like FeedBurner and Six Apart work together to promote RSS interop and resolve some incompatibilities between different software that supports syndication. ... (read more)

2006/06/21

Adding Atom 1.0 Support to RSS Sites

I switched to Atom 1.0 on Workbench two months ago, a move that hasn't been as smooth as I'd like because of one popular aggregator that doesn't support the format. This site is created using Wordzilla, a LAMP-based weblog publishing tool that I've developed over the last year. Writing code to generate Atom feeds in PHP was extremely simple, since most of the code used to generate RSS feeds could be applied to the task. Atom uses a different format for date-time values than RSS, so I had to ... (read more)

2006/05/27

A note on the home page of Planet Apache: Planet Apache provides its aggregated feeds in RSS 2.0, RSS 1.0 and RSS 0.9, and its blogroll in FOAF and OPML (the most horrific abuse of XML known to man). RSS 2.0 Specification ... (read more)

2006/05/26

RSS: Can't We All Just Get Along?

We made a little history this week in the RSS community. For the first time ever, the publishers of the two competing versions of RSS have agreed on something -- the need for a common RSS MIME type. Six years ago, a split occurred when two groups laid claim to the name RSS. Netscape engineer Dan Libby authored RSS 0.90, the first version of the format, in mid-1999. The initials stood for "RDF Site Summary" and it made use of the Resource Definition Framework, a Worldwide Web Consortium (W3C) ... (read more)

2006/05/24

I Enjoy Particularly Rigorous Specs

James E. Robinson III has a confession to make: I read specs. While sometimes messing with specs turns into a waste of time. Many times understanding the spec can keep you out of trouble. The problem is that specs are tedious, but the reality is that they have to be. Nothing is worse than a poorly written spec. Being patient and weeding thru specifications helps you understand not just how something is designed to work, but why. I used to read specs because i had to; now i read them because i ... (read more)

2006/05/19

Don Park wants to fire the RSS Advisory Board: I don't know what the hell is going on over at the RSS Advisory Board but it is starting to make my skin crawl. Who is behind all the recent activities? Whoever it is, let me say this to that person: RSS is not your milk cow. I know many of the newly appointed members and, although I think they are wonderful people, I suspect they are being taken advantage of because I don't see why they are needed. ... (read more)

2006/05/09

Requesting a MIME Media Type for RSS

In March, a member of Microsoft's Internet Explorer team asked the RSS Advisory Board for a recommendation on the MIME media type for RSS documents. One of the most reliable ways for software to distinguish different kinds of files on the Internet is through a media type, an identifier that's part of the Multipurpose Internet Mail Extensions standard. Web servers return a Content-Type header that identifies the kind of file being returned, such as "text/html" for an HTML page, "image/gif" for a ... (read more)

2006/05/09

Matthew Bookspan Joins RSS Board

Matthew Bookspan, the director of product management for the RSS aggregator developer Attensa, has joined the RSS Advisory Board. Bookspan worked at Microsoft for nine years and was part of the company's team for Internet Explorer versions 3 and 4. His experience with web content syndication goes back to Microsoft's Channel Definition Format (CDF), an early attempt to foster XML-based content sharing that predates RSS. He worked on user experience for Microsoft's Windows, Office and SQL Server ... (read more)

2006/05/08

Settlement Reached with Dave Winer

I've reached an agreement with Dave Winer regarding the Share Your OPML web application. I destroyed his original code and user data along with everything that was built from it and gave up my claim to a one-third stake in feeds.scripting.com. He gave up the claim that he's owed $5,000. I originally hoped one of us would buy the other out and launch the application, but we found a much stronger basis for agreement in a mutual desire to stop working together as quickly as possible. If Share Your ... (read more)

2006/05/02

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