Wednesday, February 11, 2004

CNET: The company chooses an alternative syndication technology for its Blogger service, leading RSS partisans to urge Google members to quit. [CNET News.com] I don't have the time or patience to adjudicate the relative merits of RSS or Atom. But I don't need to. RSS does many good things for me. I can subscribe to more feeds than I can read with RSS. I can post to my blog. Atom will split syndication, at least temporarily: some tools will understand Atom, other won't. If the developer of our particular tools does not implement Atom immediately, or if implementations have bugs (as they will). some feeds will become inaccessible. This is a real cost. Is the new format worth that much more to users to justify the forthcoming mess? Is the confusion among those who are just dipping their toes in the pond worth it? 8:46:05 PM

Dave Winer on potential syndication format wars:One of the things I told the Microsoft people this week is that if they screw with RSS the way Google is, I will quit, permanently, and never look back. If the result of all this hard work is just another venue for the ongoing pissing match between Microsoft and Silicon Valley, I'm out. [Scripting News] One of the greatest virtues of good search engines, and especially Google, has been that they take the Web as it is, not as their engineers and business people might wish it were. Most of what they index is not well-formed HTML, for example. In this, they appeared to understand the nature of writing: writers write in whichever way they feel most expedient and effective. Natural-language grammar and the formal grammars of format are contexts for communication, not unbreakable rules. If a search engine moves from taking the Web as it is to prescribing how it should be, it starts losing its inclusiveness, which is a major part of its value. 1:29:43 PM