Rss

I voted today to expand the RSS Advisory Board to 15 members and choose them privately. After serving on the board when it was private and not exceptionally well-regarded by the RSS community, I think it's extremely important to operate in the open. However, the requirement to publicly evaluate and vote on new members chases off anyone who isn't completely flame-retardant. One prospective member with years of experience in RSS development withdrew his name from consideration when he realized ... (read more)

2006/04/10

RSS: I'd Rather Switch Than Fight

Jason Young posed a question on Workbench recently: 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 ... (read more)

2006/03/31

RSS: The Joy of TextInput

I've written 21 computer books in the past decade, documenting thousands of subjects in tree-killing detail. One of my pet peeves as a technical writer is covering something that readers are unlikely to need and should never, ever use, like the discussion board component in FrontPage 2000. I devoted an entire chapter to it in Sams Teach Yourself Microsoft FrontPage 2000 in 24 Hours, a mistake I rectified in subsequent editions. (Buy a copy of the book on Amazon.Com for 92 cents!) FrontPage 2000 ... (read more)

2006/03/29

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 ... (read more)

2006/03/24

RSS Board Supports Common Feed Icon

The RSS Advisory Board proposal to support the common feed icon has passed 5-0. In an effort to make the concept of syndication easier for mainstream users, Internet Explorer, Mozilla Firefox, and Opera will all identify RSS and Atom feeds with the same icon: Subscribe The board has adopted the symbol on its site and encourages its use on web sites, browsers, and syndication software. Additionally, the board encourage web publishers to use the icon on any feed, regardless of whether it employs ... (read more)

2006/03/20

Letter from Dave Winer's Attorney

I received this letter Friday from Christopher C. Cooke, Dave Winer's attorney: Mr. Winer has retained our firm and asked us to contact you about two related matters. If an attorney is representing you, please provide this letter to your attorney and have him or her contact me. First, we request that you return the $5,000 deposit that Mr. Winer paid to you in October 2005 in connection with certain work that you were supposed to perform for Mr. Winer in revising and maintaining Mr. Winer's ... (read more)

2006/03/15

How Do I Get to Carnegie Hall?

Some bloggers have been talking up the XRSS namespace proposal I made earlier this week. This is one proposal among three currently under development on RSS-Public, the public mailing list of the RSS Advisory Board. The others are a new specification for the Really Simple Syndication format and a best practices profile, a set of recommendations for how RSS documents can work in the widest possible audience of aggregators, browsers and other software. I published the first draft of the profile ... (read more)

2006/03/09

Moving RSS Forward with an XRSS Namespace

The Really Simple Syndication format contains only five required elements -- rss, channel, title, link and description -- and either a title or description in each item. Everything else is optional. One way to tackle confusing aspects of RSS is by defining a new namespace, XRSS, with replacements for all of the optional elements. The XRSS spec could document the namespaced elements and also offer advice for the required RSS elements. To show how this would work in practice, I've created an XRSS ... (read more)

2006/03/07

Support the Common Feed Icon

A recent Yahoo study reported that four percent of Internet users have jumped on the RSS bandwagon and begun subscribing to syndicated feeds. Considering the number of ways that web publishers show their readers they offer feeds, it's amazing we've gotten that many: In an effort to make the concept of syndication easier for mainstream users, the next versions of the Internet Explorer and Opera browsers will identify RSS and Atom feeds with the same icon used in Mozilla Firefox. Since the market ... (read more)

2006/03/03

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, ... (read more)

2006/03/01

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