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 GIF graphics file, and "application/atom+xml" for Atom syndicated feeds.
RSS documents lack an an official media type.
If a media type was defined for RSS, when a user opened an RSS feed in a web browser, the browser could open the document with the user's preferred software -- just as browsers crank up an MP3 player when a link to an MP3 is clicked.
Media types must be requested from the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority with a formal RFC that chooses the desired type, explains the nature of the content, and describes why the type is needed.
The advisory board is teaming up with the RSS-DEV Working Group, the developers of RSS 1.0, on a shared request for a media type.
Jon Hanna, Bill Kearney, Greg Smith and I have prepared an application to request "application/rss+xml" as the official media type for RSS documents.
We're floating a proposal to both groups to support this media type and encourage its use for all versions of RSS, whether they use RDF Site Summary or Really Simple Syndication.
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 software and holds several patents for software design. He's a graduate of the University of California at Berkeley. Welcome to the board, Matthew!
Doctors Diagnose Booker T. Washington
Booker T. Washington did not die of syphillis, according to a review of medical records from his death in 1915.Washington's records show that his blood pressure was 225 over 145, nearly double the 120 over 80 that is considered normal.
The records also show that a blood test ruled out syphilis, a sexually transmitted disease that was widespread at the time and thought to be a particular problem among black people ...
The 91-year-old inquest was conducted for this year's Historical Clinicopathological Conference, a yearly event where doctors get together and play House with a famous person of the past who had a clinically interesting demise.
The Washington Media are a Joke
After declaring that he is well-known for being funny, Washington Post columnist Richard Cohen launches a weird snit today against Stephen Colbert for his speech at the White House Correspondents Dinner:
Colbert was not just a failure as a comedian but rude. Rude is not the same as brash. It is not the same as brassy. It is not the same as gutsy or thinking outside the box. Rudeness means taking advantage of the other person's sense of decorum or tradition or civility that keeps that other person from striking back or, worse, rising in a huff and leaving. The other night, that person was George W. Bush.
Two years ago, President Bush appeared in a skit at the same event in which his administration's inability to find WMDs in Iraq was a bottomless source of comedy. The only journalist in attendance who objected was David Corn of The Nation:
... at one point, Bush showed a photo of himself looking for something out a window in the Oval Office, and he said, "Those weapons of mass destruction have got to be somewhere."
The audience laughed. I grimaced. But that wasn't the end of it. After a few more slides, there was a shot of Bush looking under furniture in the Oval Office. "Nope," he said. "No weapons over there." More laughter. Then another picture of Bush searching in his office: "Maybe under here." Laughter again.
Disapproval must have registered upon my face, for one of my tablemates said, "Come on, David, this is funny." I wanted to reply, Over 500 Americans and literally countless Iraqis are dead because of a war that was supposedly fought to find weapons of mass destruction, and Bush is joking about it.
Washington journalists like Cohen, who didn't raise as much as a peep when Bush laughed off the false cause that sparked a war, have now spent five days haranguing a cable TV comedian for making the president huffy.
Writer Tells Wikipedia He Got a Divorce
I fleshed out a placeholder entry on Wikipedia this morning, giving the Richardson, Texas, high school where "Jeremy spoke in class today" enough substance to inspire future editors to work on it.I've made around 150 edits to Wikipedia in the past year, most extensively on new bios and the unspeakably hideous "alcopop" drink Zima.
Starting new subjects is a lot more fun than defending existing ones from vandalism. My Drudge Retort coconspirator Jonathan Bourne and I worked on the Zima entry as a form of competitive sport, digging up increasingly obscure details and taunting each other with our unstoppable editing moves.
When you write a new entry in Wikipedia, it quickly becomes one of the most authoritative sources on the web about that subject. I have created seven entries in the past year. Six are now in the top 10 results for their name on Google.
One thing I find fascinating about the encyclopedia is how it accretes knowledge.
When I wrote the biography for Alexandra Shulman, a British fashion journalist who was amusingly dismissive of the site, I couldn't find concrete details on her marriage or son. In the press, she hasn't been a particularly gabby person where those topics are concerned, and I wasn't going to ask her directly because that seems like a disturbing thing to do. "Hi, I'm a complete stranger with an inordinate amount of interest in your personal life. Are you still married?"
I had to be vague, so I wrote in Wikipedia that she "has a son, Sam (b. 1994 or 1995), with the writer Paul Spike, from whom she is separated."
In March, someone in Wales edited the entry to indicate that her son was born in 1995.
In late April, "separated" was changed to "divorced" by an editor who also wrote a new Wikipedia entry on Spike. The same person uploaded a self-portrait of him, so it appears that Shulman's ex-husband has been compelled by my entry to give the world confirmation of their split.
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 OPML was a Java project I would've been heartsick to destroy it, but I coded the application in PHP. I've never written anything in PHP I didn't want to completely rewrite six months later.
Some people think I'm an asshat for taking this public, and I won't argue with that, but I don't have the resources to fight an intellectual property lawsuit against a millionaire. Winer knows this -- he's been a guest in my home -- and it's clear his attorney was acting from the same assumption throughout the settlement negotiation.
I decided the best way to avoid court was to show Winer what it would be like to sue a blogger.
I figured the publicity would be a stronger motivator to resolve the matter than anything I could say through an attorney. He's one of the most galvanizing figures in the technology industry. If he ever sues someone, the publication of the case's motions and depositions will put a blog in the Technorati Top 100. Since publishing the letter from Winer's attorney, my traffic's through the roof, I'm getting fan mail and I received three programming job offers.
I'm extremely grateful for the public support and the offers to contribute to a legal defense fund on my behalf, which I was hoping might lead to a Free Kevin-style sticker-based political movement.
Some programmers have said that I was foolish to write the app on the basis of a verbal agreement, and I'll concede that wholeheartedly. I won't even do the laundry now without something in writing.
I'm not going to close the book on this debacle with any Panglossian happy talk about how it all worked out for the best. This was a completely unnecessary sphincter-fusing legal dispute that could have been settled amicably months ago without benefit of counsel.
But I'm glad to stop pursuing an application so closely associated with OPML, because I don't share Winer's enthusiasm for the format.
I used to feel differently, but now that I've worked with it extensively, OPML's an underspecified, one-size-fits-all kludge that doesn't serve a purpose beyond the exchange of simple data. There's little need for an XML dialect to represent outlines. Any XML format is a hierachy of parent-child relationships that could be editable as an outline with a single addition: a collapsed attribute that's either true or false.
Developers who build on OPML will encounter a lot of odd data because the format has been extended in a non-standard way. An outline item's type attribute has a value that indicates the other attributes which might be present. No one knows how many different attributes are in use today, so if you tell users that your software "supports OPML," you're telling them you support arbitrary XML data that can't be checked against a document type definition.
OPML's also the only XML dialect I'm aware of that stuffs all character data inside attributes. Now that OPML's being turned into a weblog publishing format, outline items will have ginormous attribute values holding escaped HTML markup like this:
<outline text="<img src="http://images.scripting.com/archiveScriptingCom/2006/03/16/chockfull.jpg" width="53" height="73" border="0" align="right" hspace="15" vspace="5" alt="A picture named chockfull.jpg"><a href="http://scobleizer.wordpress.com/2006/03/16/the-new-a-list/">Scoble laments</a> all the flamers in the thread on <b style="color:black;background-color:#ffff66">Rogers Cadenhead's</b> site, but isn't it obvious that the <i>purpose</i> of his post was to get a flamewar going? What non-flamer is going to post in the middle of a festival like that one? I'm not as worried about it as Scoble is, because I've seen better flamewars and I know how they turn out. In a few days he's still going to have to try to resolve the matter with me, and the flamers will have gone on to some other trumped-up controversy. The days when you could fool any number of real people with a charade like this are long past. And people who use pseudonyms to call public figures schoolyard names are not really very serious or threatening. <a href="http://allied.blogspot.com/2006/03/lynch-mob-security.html">Jeneane Sessum</a> is right in saying it's extreme to call this a lynch mob. It's just a bunch of <a href="http://www.cadenhead.org/workbench/news/2881/letter-dave-winers-attorney#46458">anonymous comments</a> on a snarky blog post. Big deal. Not. <a href="http://www.scripting.com/2006/03/16.html#When:11:21:10PM">" created="Tue, 16 March 2006 11:21:10 GMT"/>
I'd be amazed if XML parsers can handle attribute values of any length, but that's what's being done today with OPML.
Now that an agreement has been reached, Winer doesn't have to share Share Your OPML and I can flee in terror before any border skirmishes lead to another XML specification war.
Maybe this is the best of all possible worlds.
Update: Winer appears to have launched a new PHP-based implementation of Share Your OPML with Dan MacTough.
Much Ado about Nothing
Matt Haughey started catching hell from members of a site called Shoutwire who thought he had hacked Fox News to steal traffic for his personal weblog, A Whole Lotta Nothing.Turns out that loading a Fox News story within a frame, as Shoutwire did, triggers some Javascript code that redirects the visitor to "http://nothing":
if (parent.frames.length > 0) {
parent.location.href = "http://nothing";
}
In Mozilla Firefox, trying http://nothing takes users to the top Google result for the word nothing -- Haughey's blog.
Social Media
Subscriptions
Blogroll
Projects
RSS Advisory Board
How to Read an RSS Feed with Java Using XOM
The RSS Advisory Board Just Turned 20
Downloading 50,000 Podcast Feeds to Analyze Their RSS
Tara Calishain Explains: What is RSS?
Be Unique And Use RSS Guid Like Everybody Else
Statistics
This blog has been published since Nov. 7, 1999 (a span of 9,404 days).
Thank you for visiting Workbench.
