JY's Weblog

 jeudi 26 juin 2003

Eh guys, i'm launching a new Syndication format. yeah. i'll call it JYS (for Jean Yves Syndication). Why not? everybody's doing this nowadays!

Please, if you haven't done it today, read the RSS2.0 spec. It's so simple that a French could understand it. And furthermore it works for some time now.

Some people caused confusion by breaking RSS0.9x evolution calling a new format RSS1.0, with no backward compatibility and reimposing an RDF syntax that had be taken away since the first days of RSS. (If 10 people exploit the RDF syntax of RSS1.0 in their app, please tell us how)

And now, some people (the same?!) want to create more and more confusion by creating a new format from scratch.

Do you think RSS is so much complicated and broken that it has to be rebuilt from scratch ? No way ! The only small justifications for this undeavor are of this level : "We don't know if html is allowed in the title tag". Oh yeah ! let's build a new format then !

I can now see a trend. Look at XML-RPC/SOAP. Dave insisted in keeping the format simple, but others wanted more and more and more features. We have now a complicated SOAP, and a very easy and powerful XML-RPC that everybody loves to use. Note that XML-RPC has some problems too (it is ascii based for example), but having a frozen spec that works simply for most cases is a lot better that letting it grow the SOAP way.

Let's froze RSS2.0 (namespaces let everyone extend it if necessary), and explicite more what is the common uses of some tags contents.

Some people will still be pissed in 10 years because RSS is not RDF based. But eh maybe they'll still be pissed about it in 20 years when nobody remembers what RDF was.

Note : You don't build formats with insults and mean feelings. Some people should stop acting like 11 years old kids.