Dave Winer and the RSS Advisory Board
The current proposal to clarify the RSS 2.0 specification has drawn a response from Dave Winer:
Every so often I get an email asking what's up with the RSS Advisory Board.
Here's what I thought in May 2004: "This group is not a standards organization. It does not own RSS, or the spec, it has no more or less authority than any other group of people who wish to promote RSS."
Today I think it's even less than that. It basically stopped functioning later in 2004. The people involved went on to do other things. In the meantime RSS kept growing and growing.
Did RSS actually need an "advisory board?" No, it didn't.
I think it's great that people care about RSS. Keep supporting it, and if you want to help people use it, great. Just don't pretend there's any official board or body or whatever behind it, because there isn't.
Oh and by the way this is where the RSS 2.0 spec is and always will be. (Modulo redirects and Acts of Murphy.)
Winer wishes the board he founded in 2003 didn't exist, so he's rewriting history to claim it folded up shop after he resigned. But if you go back and read his resignation, you'll find that he encouraged us to keep working on the spec and help developers:
After giving it much thought, I've decided to resign from the RSS Advisory Board, effective July 1. I feel that the process for clarifying the spec is now well-understood by the existing members, and we have started a positive working relationship with several leading aggregator developers. ... I wish the continuing members of the board the very best, and of course I will continue to be a huge booster of RSS and syndication technology, and I will offer my opinion, through this blog, naturally, as always.
The board's serving a useful purpose, as demonstrated by the 1,300 posts on the RSS-Public mailing list and a best-practices profile for RSS that's nearing completion after 14 months of development.
As the lead author of RSS 2.0, Winer continues to be the most respected voice on matters related to the format. But he refuses to say anything that would help developers resolve points of confusion in the spec, such as the issue of namespace attributes.
Until he does, the board will do its best to address them. Our vote on revising the spec begins in five days.
Clarifying Namespace Support in RSS 2.0
Randy Charles Morin has proposed the addition of four words to the RSS 2.0 specification (emphasis added):
In the section Extending RSS, we propose that the following sentence be changed:
"A RSS feed may contain elements not described on this page, only if those elements are defined in a namespace."
It should be revised to read as follows:
"A RSS feed may contain elements and attributes not described on this page, only if those elements and attributes are defined in a namespace."
This proposal was the subject of a pre-emptive strike Monday by Sam Ruby, who regards it as "positively breathtaking" that I would reach this conclusion after examining the issue in October and again this month on RSS-Public, the board's mailing list.
I respect Ruby's knowledge of XML and syndication formats, but this is one of the rare instances where I have the pleasure of saying that he's completely wrong. The RSS 2.0 spec does not forbid namespace attributes to core elements. There was never any expressed intent to do that back in 2002, and if they were forbidden, every RSS feed that declares a namespace in the rss element would be invalid. (We're talking millions of feeds.)
As Ruby points out, I thought otherwise the first time we hashed out this issue back in October. I was wrong.
Conservative: A Journalist Who Got Mugged
What Toronto journalist Jessica Hume, 25, thought about muggers last week:... I would have seen the attackers as possible victims of our society. I'd have assumed they were alienated youths, disconnected from their neighbours, teachers, peers -- people who don't feel represented by their politicians. I would even have felt sorry for them to some degree.
What she thinks of them now after getting mugged:
I don't feel any sympathy now, not for the people who come equipped with weapons, waiting in the dark for unsuspecting passersby making their way home. That is a choice they made. No one forced them to make that choice.
Most People are Above Average
There's some interesting math in a commentary by Hal Becker, a motivational speaker and salesman who sounds like the Xerox Corporation's Bill Brasky:Here's a scary statistic: There are approximately 14 million salespeople in the U.S. today, and studies show that 98 percent are average or below.
Linking to the RSS 2.0 Specification
As chairman of the RSS Advisory Board, I've been called into two discussions recently about where people should link when referring to RSS 2.0.
There are two leading contenders: the RSS 2.0 specification published by the board and an older copy archived by Dave Winer.
The board's web site moved off Harvard's server in January 2006 to our own domain, rssboard.org. We've published the RSS 2.0 specification since 2003 and the current version of the document will always have the permanent URL http://www.rssboard.org/rss-specification. Our transition from Harvard's server to our own was described here.
Contrary to some claims I've read, the specification does not include new RSS elements or attributes that differ from what the board published prior to the server move. The only changes we've made to the document were administrative ones described in an August 2006 proposal and vote.
We're a public group that operates under a charter and has members from Microsoft, Yahoo, Netscape, Six Apart, BlogLines and others in the RSS community. I was asked to join in 2004 by Winer, who resigned shortly thereafter. I recently began a new two-year term as chair.
The copy of the RSS 2.0 specification archived by Winer is a just an older version of the spec. The board has archived the same version along with all of the older specs, for historical purposes.
There's contention within the RSS community about our work, as there is with anything involving RSS and syndication. But we've been conservative in regard to the specification and all other matters related to the format. We're primarily a place where people can get help with the format and developers can promote new namespaces and other ways to improve interoperability. Anyone who has questions about what we do is invited to join us on the public mailing list RSS-Public.
Long Live the King of Queens
The King of Queens sitcom ended last night on CBS after nine years, and cast member Patton Oswalt (Spencer) wrote a sendoff that made the innocuous working-class comedy series sound twisted:I'm also glad I got to play Spencer, who evolved into the depository for all the writer's wild hairs. Making out with old women, gay panic, double-dating Adam West and Lou Ferrigno, wrestling matches over an asthma inhaler, driving all night to stop a wedding, stalking ... if there was something creepy the writers felt like they could get away with, they let me do it.
So today I get something in the mail which I think brings my time on The King of Queens to a poetic, poignant close.
It's a letter and gift certificate from Patrick Lenow, the Director of the "Celebrity VIP Club" for the International House of Pancakes. I quote part of the letter:
"We were flattered to hear Danny trying to convince Spence to go to IHOP after their high school reunion on a recent episode. Even though Spence had a 'questionable' predicament to sort out ... "
(I was going home with a lesbian, who I hoped to still get to ---- 'cause she had mistaken me for a lesbian)
" ... with all of IHOP's delicious menu choices for breakfast, lunch and dinner, there's no questioning IHOP's ability to satisfy any hungry guest!"
Patrick's not wrong on that one. Whenever I bomb out trying to nail a ---- when she discovers my ----, nothing soothes the sting of regret like a short stack of buckwheat griddlecakes!
Using GoDaddy's Domain Back Order Service
I recently got the domain name watchingthewatchers.com in a drop when the previous owner let it expire. Since Watching the Watchers has been published at the same name in .org since 2004, we've been losing traffic from people who mistakenly tried the .com and ended up at a parked domain.
To get the domain, I set up an account on GoDaddy and used its domain monitoring and back order service. You can monitor 100 domains for $5.99 and receive email when they're put on hold for non-payment or their status changes in other ways.
You can backorder a specific domain for $18.99 or five domains for $94.95. This doesn't guarantee you'll get them, because GoDaddy's competing with other domain-drop services and registrars, but if it fails you can reassign your order to another domain at no cost. Based on a few times I tried it out, it appears that GoDaddy loses more often than it wins when the domain's hotly contested. For this particular domain, I felt like I had a good chance because the old owner used GoDaddy as his registrar.
GoDaddy only will sell a backorder for a domain to one customer, so if you wait for the monitoring service to tell you its on hold, you might be too late.
The only disadvantage to using the service is that it increases the likelihood you'll accumulate more dumb domains you had no rational reason to register, which has been an issue for me. I also got sins.biz using GoDaddy's drop service, but all of the decent ecommerce possibilities for that domain are illegal in the U.S. outside of a few counties in Nevada.
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