Blogging Roller

<a href= "http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/200x/2003/04/22/RSS-Problems">Tim Bray, RSS Needs Fixing: Because, boys and girls, RSS is no longer a science experiment, it's becoming an important part of the infrastructure, which means that a lot of programmmers are going to get the assignment of generating and parsing it, and they need better instructions.

XML co-inventor Tim Bray comments on the problems with RSS and uses language so foul that not even <a href= "http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/blogs/static/crimson1/fuckbrained.gif">Dave Winer can handle it (Dave deleted his post about it, but forgot to delete his illustration). Tim has a lot to say and you should <a href= "http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/200x/2003/04/22/RSS-Problems">read it yourself if you care about RSS, but the two problems he complains about are that entity-encoded HTML is allowed and that relative URI references are not allowed. Tim also mentions the informality of the RSS spec. I agree with all of his points and especially the one about the spec. We need a real, formal spec, managed by a standards body, something like the one that Mark Nottingham recently wrote up. I'm not sure why Mark's spec got such a luke-warm reception.

Tim's article, in part, was responsible for sending Sam Ruby's fingers into furious blogging mode. Basically, Sam agrees with Tim on both of his points, suggests adding a namespace to RSS, and mentions bringing IETF in as an RSS standardization body. Sam wrote up a bunch of excellent posts on RSS, much better than the post you are reading right now. Check them out:

• Future of RSS
• Ghosts of RSS past
• RSS: it's not just for syndication anymore
• RSS namespace proposal