Dave says that RSS is a syndication format, nothing more. And that it has nothing to do with RDF. I am just curious, why does Dave get to make these decisions if these are community standards?
In a similar vein, I'd like to say that HTML is for text. Not images. Sure, you can put in img tags or object tags. But that's not what it's for. So leave images out of it. Thank you.
One point I will readily concede is that people looking to incorporate namespaces into syndication formats shouldn't have stuck with the name RSS. But not merely for any technical reason. RSS x.0 needs to be transcended because these are becoming consumer technologies. Worthy of much more than some dorky acronym. Blogger wasn't named RPT: Recursive Publishing Tool. That's part of why it caught on with normal people.
One of the few lessons I've learned since I was a young boy is that the commerical marketplace is largely a meritocracy, but not a technical one. It's a marketing meritocracy, and if you want to see these important communication tools get adopted, it's time to find a marketable name for them.
There's one and only one way to defeat Dave's spec: out compete him. Build an app that requires RDF. Make sure it can't even take RDF from an XSLT transform of RSS 0.9x/2.0. Make it so great that nobody will want to miss out, and feed it with non-news feeds. Throw in search results and events where the file order isn't the right order, so that the accursed rdf:Seq actually has to pull its weight.
Or, at the very least, badger aggregator authors until they support a few of the 1.0 modules. Remember, the reason for 1.0 to exist was to allow the community to extend RSS - it wasn't "we must have RDF in RSS" so much as "Dave won't listen to what we want in RSS". Two years later, I know of one aggregator that supports content:encoded, and one other one that supports dc:creator and dc:subject. Period.
So, what's the killer app for namespace-enhanced syndication formats? Why did everyone want them?
I don't think making the name user-friendly will have much of an effect. Syndication through XML _is_ technical and, ideally, users shouldn't have to know about it at all. (Which is why autodiscovery was so important.)
You should only have to market formats to developers. Market syndication to users.
HTML is not "for text". It's for marking-up data, whatever form that data might take.
That was really really sensible. There has been very little written on the various RSS/RDF tomfoolery that is at all sensible. Thanks.
Marcus, I agree. There was some sarcasm there.
FWIW, some friends were brainstorming, and the marketing names we came up with for a syndication format were: infeed, wordwide, newsthrough, shareview, newsflow, newspass, wordcast, writeaway, readway and allwrite. Most of these have .org domains available.
For example, I grabbed allwrite.org. So someone could trademark it as a syndication compatibility brand name, and require tools to support creation or consumption of RSS 1.0, in addition to other RSS formats, in order to use the name in marketing.
And no, for a consumer, these aren't technical formats. Thing along these lines as bullet points in a feature list:
"NetNewsWire supports reading AllWrite™ feeds natively."
"This tool enables Microsoft Word to publish AllWrite-compatible documents."
"Check this box to make Movable Type create an AllWrite-ready news feed from your weblog."
But I already know how the marketing would work, if people had any sense. And I have an idea what the killer app would be. Do any of you tech guys have an idea?
Along with the name change, the consumer also must understand what it is they are using. If RSS is something more than a syndication format, what is it?
For example, lets say my friend Jimmy Journo wants to start a blog, and I tell him to support RSS. "Why?" he asks. How do I answer him? The simplest answer would be "So other sources can syndicate your writing and you can grow your readership." But beyond that, what other compelling reasons are there? If there are none, then maybe RSS is just a syndication format.
Personally I think the real appeal of RSS is that we finally have a single unifying standard to share content. No more screen-scraping hacks; its one of the dreams of the internet. This is similar to the RSS-as-syndication argument; is it really so bad?
Swap AllWrite with XML and you have every software product review from the past two years. Of course, noone really ever told consumers what use it was... only that it was "good" and that they needed to input / output it. ;)
So, like the general XML hype of times gone by, the point isn't necessarily that it should be widely understood by users, just that it could easily be marketable to them with something as simple as a name change. Increasing demand, and forcing it through. Or something.
I know what we could call it: PointCast! Oh no, wait, that isn't going to fly...