Looking for Détente in Really Simple Syndication
Just how many types of anxiety are there, anyway? I got to thinking about this as I read a blog that mentioned "RSS Anxiety." For those of you who have not yet come face-to-face with this little acronym, it stands for Real Simple Syndication and it spreads whatever you want all over the internet, virtually creating an immortal life all its own.
Can you kill an idea once it is out on the internet? No. Can you try to correct it? Yes, but you'll never accomplish this goal. -- Patricia Farrell, author of How to Be Your Own Therapist
Earlier this week, the Press-Enterprise newspaper of Riverside, Calif., ran a business story about an industrial zone six miles from the border of North and South Korea that seeks to strengthen ties between the bitter, long-warring rivals.
The newspaper gave the article the headline, "Business park makes ties that build Korean détente."
The word détente is one of many in English that includes a diacritical mark, a symbol such as an accent, cedilla or diaeresis.
The paper included the story in a Really Simple Syndication feed. If the editors take a look at how the headline appears in some of the leading RSS software, they'll discover one of the unfortunate realities of working with the format:
RSS does not allow détente.
The Press-Enterprise gave the headline the following formatting:
<title>Business park makes ties that build Korean d&eacute;tente</title>
The "d&eacute;tente" part is an attempt to get an RSS reader to produce the output "détente". The "é" in détente is an acute accent diacritical mark, and one way to write one on the web is by using the HTML entity é.
The following screen captures show how this headline appears in eight highly popular RSS readers and web browsers:
Bloglines:
BottomFeeder 4.1:
FeedDemon 1.5:
Microsoft Internet Explorer 7:
Mozilla Firefox:
My Yahoo
Newsgator Online:
Opera 9:
As you can see, five of the eight display détente and the other three display "détente," including the two most popular web browsers on the planet. The difference occurs because the first group expects an RSS item's title to contain HTML, while the second group expects it to be plain text.
The simplest conclusion is that one group's not implementing the RSS title element properly, but there's nothing simple about the issue in the current specification. The spec states that an item's description can be HTML, but it doesn't state whether any other elements can do likewise.
One section of the draft specification attempts to solve the problem in this manner:
For all elements defined in this specification that enclose character data, the text must be interpreted as plain text with the exception of an item's description element, which must be suitable for presentation as HTML.
Dave Winer declared today that the war to clarify the spec is over and everybody won:
We live with the imperfections of RSS 2.0, because that's the way life is. Nothing and no one is exactly as we'd like them to be.
If that's supposed to be the final word on RSS, can somebody tell me how to build détente?
Name All Five Freedoms
In a telephone poll of 1,000 Americans reported by the BBC, 22 percent could name all five Simpsons but only 1-in-1,000 could name all five freedoms delineated in the First Amendment.I'm curious to see whether weblog readers are smarter than telephone owners.
Without cheating, use the comments of this entry to name all five freedoms.
I'm already on record with my guess on the Drudge Retort, and I got three out of five, leaving off one that's an extreme personal embarrassment.
One of the winners will be randomly selected to receive a pair of Cordarounds, the world's first horizontal corduroy pants, on the condition that he or she agrees to model them for Workbench and write a weblog entry on what it's like to exercise your freedom of pantaloons.
Damon Wayans Makes His Mark
New York Daily News columnist Stanley Crouch blasts Damon Wayans' attempt to trademark the word "N---a" for a clothing line and other uses, a story I covered for Wired News:He wants to put it on apparel and whatnot. So far, he has not been successful but one can imagine young American kids wearing that word emblazoned on clothes and listening to rap "songs" in which the N-word frequently appears, in conjunction with "bitches" and "hos," among other denigrations.
Of course, there is a defense. One Hollywood Negro said that "Damon is no fool. He might be pulling a Brer Rabbit move that would mean that he would take control of the word and make everyone pay to use it."
I responded rappers and others would merely put the cost in the budget.
An interesting discussion of the issue is taking place on the black entertainment site ConcreteLoop, where some fans are also hoping Wayans did it for non-commercial reasons:
we throw that word around like crazy. including me. it is a part of our lingo. no matter the coast or geographic location we use n---a scandolously. this may be a ploy to have us take a very close look at ourselves.
Response to Brad Feld
Brad Feld of Mobius Venture Capital recently made public an e-mail he sent me with suggestions for the RSS Advisory Board.Here's my response, which I also e-mailed to Feld, with some relevant hyperlinks added:
From my perspective, the purpose of the RSS Advisory Board is always open to reconsideration. This is a three-year-old organization that has been operating in public for one month. We've just begun hearing from RSS developers, publishers and executives in significant number.
I think the best way forward for the board is to keep doing exactly what the organization did under Dave Winer's leadership -- support developers, publish supplementary documentation, and clarify the RSS specification without changing the format.
Other members may decide to support his current position, which if I understand it correctly, calls for the existing RSS specification never to be edited again.
Changing the focus of the board from RSS to syndication might ease some contentious debate in the RSS community, but it wouldn't address long-standing questions for developers implementing the current specification.
There are significant aspects of RSS that lack clarity in the specification. How many podcasts can an item contain? What RSS elements can carry HTML? How does an RSS aggregator turn relative URLs into full URLs?
The proposed specification currently under draft at the RSS board's site is an effort to resolve questions like these, not change the format or create a new format that would raise the implementation cost of syndication for everyone.
If the spec reaches a vote at some future date and is rejected by the board -- or the board votes at any time to cease work on it -- I'd remove the spec from publication and pursue a "best practices" document or another method to address the situation.
RSS Board Launches Socialtext Wiki
The RSS Advisory Board now has a wiki provided by member Ross Mayfield and Socialtext.The impetus behind the launch of the workspace is to support efforts on the RSS-Public mailing list, such as software tests like one that I've been conducting to see how well aggregators can display a diaresis character.
(Loïc Le Meur has agreed to be a diacritical test subject.)
Anyone can create an account and edit pages, as long as the content's related in some form to what we're doing on the advisory board. The wiki can be used to collectively draft etiquette policies and other guidelines as they become necessary. Feel free to experiment with its collaboration tools.
Thanks, Ross!
Really Simple Syndication: The Joy of Specs
The ongoing Canterbury tale about the efforts of the RSS Advisory Board must be utterly incomprehensible to people who have enthusiastically adopted Really Simple Syndication without knowing the history of the format.Syndication is like sausage, major Congressional legislation and Bruce Jenner. You might be better off not knowing how it's made.
Dave Winer, the co-creator of RSS and the person most responsible for its widespread adoption, argues that the current version of the RSS specification must never be revised in order to protect the stability of the format:
These constraints have served us well. They have kept the platform stable, so Microsoft could take two years to adopt it from top to bottom in their Windows operating system, and not have RSS change while they did their work.
This position deserves strong consideration, though I must point out that under his leadership the board made six revisions to the specification.
If the current spec is treated as the final word on the matter, there are practical consequences to that decision for RSS software developers, publishers and users.
One of the biggest involves podcasting.
An RSS feed may carry podcasts and other media files, storing them in enclosures associated with items in the feed.
There's disagreement among developers over whether the spec permits more than one enclosure in each item. Some believe that because it doesn't explicitly forbid multiple enclosures, they're permitted. Others can demonstrate that the spec author's intent was to allow no more than one.
The publishing tools Blogware, Movable Type and WordPress all produce RSS feeds with multiple enclosures per item.
The political weblog Power Line, published with Movable Type 3.15, offers a podcast feed that includes multiple enclosures.
This feed doesn't work properly in some popular podcast-enabled RSS clients, including Bloglines, FeedDemon, Google Reader and new software being developed by Microsoft, the company whose top-to-bottom support for RSS is cited as the reason to leave the spec alone.
The preview edition of Microsoft Internet Explorer 7 only downloads the first enclosure in each item. Power Line users who listen to its podcasts with that browser must manually download the other enclosures, which removes the biggest advantage of podcasting -- instant availability of the files.
When Microsoft rolls out the browser later this year, millions of new users will be introduced to RSS and podcasts for the first time.
If no group has the authority to resolve the enclosures issue, all podcasters relying on multiple enclosures will be publishing RSS feeds that don't work for what is potentially their largest audience.
Journey to the Center of the Earth
Wired News is running my story today about the center of the world: the Shamrock "K" Horse Center near Coffeyville, Kansas.Maggie Dew, the geocacher who journeyed to the center and brought back photos, has planted a cache not far from the city at a '60s landmark called Peace Point:
Some friends and I had a little shop in downtown Coffeyville called the Hobbit Hole. We had a peace flag in the front window, and it wasn't long before someone decided to lob a brick through it. During the same period, some of my friends put up a huge peace symbol on a tall pipe on this bluff overlooking Coffeyville. It could be seen from quite a distance, and it was written up in the Coffeyville Journal. Again, in less than a week's time, someone cut it down. A piece of that pipe still sticks out of the ground today. Take a walk out to this viewpoint overlooking the town and contemplate why, to some, the concept of peace is such a fearful and loathsome thing.
The satellite photos on Google are prompting a lot of sightseeing, as I found while obsessing over Google Maps during the preparation of the story. My favorite discovery is the Palm Beach UFO.
Palm Beach County has a large population of elderly residents, bringing its median age up to 42. I don't want to reach a definitive conclusion until the subject's covered by Coast to Coast, but the high-altitude weather balloon theory is no fun at all. I'm thinking aliens came back to fetch more cocoons and have non-contact laser-light sex with Steve Guttenburg's rib cage.
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