May Your RSS Always Be Well-Formed

I'm working on an RSS Profile, a set of recommendations for RSS publishers that make it easier to create feeds that work in aggregators and other software. I published the third draft this morning.

Unlike a specification, the profile contains subjective advice on how to avoid common pitfalls in RSS, like the unresolved question of whether an item may contain multiple enclosures.

The goal of the project is to create a profile that's recommended by the RSS Advisory Board. If that fails, I'll promote it personally on Workbench.

Anyone who wants to build on the profile can do so, because it is offered under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 2.0 license, even in the current draft form.

Rss · 2006/03/24 · 6 COMMENTS · Link

Comments

Rogers,

I don't care what others think... You have the potential to become the "Lord God of RSS"

McD

#1 · McD · 2006/03/24

"item may contain multiple enclosures" where i can see example of this pitfall?

#2 · Alexei A. Korolev · 2006/03/24

I wrote a post on the issue recently. It also has come up on the RSS-Public mailing list.

#3 · Rogers Cadenhead · 2006/03/24

Rogers,

I have followed the whole RSS soap opera from even well before Mark Pilgrim was writing snarky posts about Winer numbers. I've actually taken more than one opportunity to call it "Internet Jerry Springer" among my IT colleagues and others that I was evangelizing syndication (and RSS) to - and that was prior to the 2006 events with the Advisory Board and what I feel is inexplicable behavior from Winer.

The whole hullabaloo has the group of people I work with (a National web effort targeting information coming out of the US land-grants and the cooperative extension system) thinking of solely Atom, and where we say RSS - we really are referring to Atom. Our web apps are going to encourage Atom, produce Atom, consume Atom, etc. Almost entirely after watching the continued craziness surrounding its use.

I admire and respect your work, your tenacity, your continued evangelistic zeal in what you do here, and elsewhere in the things you write about. So I guess this whole rambly comment is to ask - why are you even sticking with this RSS thing? Why not take that energy and put it behind something with what seems far less "Springer Factor"?

This isn't a troll. It's a serious curiousity on my part.

#4 · Jason Young · 2006/03/24

I think the reality is that RSS will continue in large part due to the physics of inertia... It's easy to get code working that produces and/or consumes the RSS format(s).

Having said that, Rogers should continue to define more "specifics" around RSS 2.0 Best Practices. A day may come where those practices are allowed to be "Spec'ed" in a newly acronymed fork of RSS 2.0. like RSSS (Really Stable Simple Syndication) or XRSS or "Molecule".

Of course, serious Syndication programming efforts SHOULD adopt Atom and drive the further development of a truly 'Open Standard' and not just some wizard's pet format...

"Ignore that man behind the curtain"

and his lawyers... IMHO.

Does the world need multiple standards? No, it nevers does but it has such situations all the time due to inretia and vested interest:

NFS, CIFS

SNMP, CMIP

MP3, AAC, Ogg, Wav

Video Codecs? "Lions and tigers Oh My."

I don't think we're in Kansas anymore.

#5 · McD · 2006/03/24

Watch it Jason. You can say almost anything in these comments, but criticising Mark Pilgrim is one think Cadenhead doesn't stand for.

#6 · Andew Lasey · 2006/03/24