Dave Winer is angry.
Okay, I'm glad I got that out of the way. I am angry that Bray used me in such an awful way to be so wantonly destructive and now that he sees the destruction is trying to scramble as fast as he can into the hills. I've expressed that. Now let's try to move on.
How about let's try to put this back together so that RSS stays what it is, a simple syndication format, with a set of best practices that all parties adhere to, so that the format isn't vulnerable to takeover by one or more BigCo's. If you want to understand why I never took the spec to the W3C, there it is. It's a consortium of BigCo's with a director who is an RDF advocate, and until very recently an anemic patent policy. Such an organization cannot be trusted with RSS, imho.
The IETF is not much of a standards organization. Mark Nottingham turned the RSS 2.0 spec into something IETF-able, and while I didn't endorse it, I didn't stand in its way either. I was neutral on it, because it's kind of an empty thing to do. Anyone could follow such an action with a restatement of what RSS is, and that restatement would be just as valid as the original statement. Not much of a basis for interop, imho.
The other standards organizations are less familiar to me, and probably mostly are controlled by BigCo's who I don't trust (based on experience), so the RSS spec has stayed on backend.userland.com, waiting for a group of senior industry people without a major conflict of interest to work with me to figure out what's best for everyone, but most of all what's best for RSS. Maybe that day is here. It kind of depends on what's in Sam's heart, Jon's heart, and even Tim Bray's heart, even though I hate what he did, I recognize his brilliance, and think he probably was just a fool, that he wasn't deliberately trying to destroy the tenuous peace in RSS-land.
[Scripting News]
Saturday, June 28, 2003
