It’s all RSS to me
Posted on February 15, 2004
Filed Under /dev/null/ | 54 views |
Mark Pilgrim dissects the various flavours of RSS floating about in The myth of RSS compatibility:
I would like to publicly apologize for my previous misstatements. There are not 7 different and incompatible versions of RSS; there are 9.
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There are 9 versions of RSS, all of which are incompatible with various other versions. RSS 0.90 is incompatible with Netscape’s RSS 0.91, Netscape’s RSS 0.91 is incompatible with Userland’s RSS 0.91, Netscape’s RSS 0.91 is incompatible with RSS 1.0, Userland’s RSS 0.91 is incompatible with RSS 0.92, RSS 0.92 is incompatible with RSS 0.93, RSS 0.93 is incompatible with RSS 0.94, RSS 0.94 is incompatible with RSS 2.0, and RSS 2.0 is incompatible with itself.
If Douglas Adams were still alive I would have bet it all that he’d written that last bit and would have laughed aloud. As it is, it makes me want to drink instead.
Amazingly complex for a system that quite simple defines information about information using little words and carats, isn’t it? It’s not like we’re landing the stuff on the bloody moon, is it?
I’ve come of the opinion that to RSS we collectively say: “screw you” and unite behind Atom. I don’t really care if Atom is better or not at this stage, I just care that there’s only one Atom and that it’s been sent off to the IETF for consideration as a standard. It could suck swamp water through a straw; as long as it sucks equally well everywhere, I don’t mind. This is well-and-truly one area where starting over is a Good Idea(tm).
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