Some people say I shouldn't be doing this, that we should let the users stay in the dark, but believe me, I've been here before, that doesn't work. Users should know, they're the ones with the power.

Let's try it this way. There's a core of RSS that's very simple, that you can build an aggregator around, a very simple aggregator without most of the features in the Radio aggregator. No enclosures, permalinks, links to comments. Because each item doesn't have a unique publication date or an identifier (called a guid) you'll see a repeat if the author changes just the spelling of one word.

From this core, we evolved RSS to include all those features. Of course there's more than one way to do it, you could make highway signs orange instead of green, traffic lights could be purple, gray and pink -- the changes they're making are "valid" but they mean that ultimately compatibility will be expressed in terms of products, not formats. I'll say my aggregator can read Blogger feeds but not Movable Type feeds. You've seen this before. Word processors, spreadsheets, databases. But not the Web. That's why the Web was special.

Now, when Sun owns Movable Type and Microsoft owns Google, these wars will amount to something. My hope was that we'd sort all this out and get a rock solid format in place before any of the Big's really got a foothold here, so that as users (which is what we'll be then, of course) we'll be able to count on the feeds having at least the basic stuff, the stuff in the second paragraph.

When I went to Movable Type and Blogger, privately, they basically told me to xxx off. (Not in words, in actions.) That's what Don Park realized, and that's why he's angry. He should be. Users should be too. This is strictly bad for users. This is not an ego game. The core is frozen. I don't control it. It is what it is, it will never be anything else. The Roadmap of the spec says that clearly. So they would lose nothing by supporting it, and if they really believe in the little guy, they would just support it and stop this argument right now.

# Posted on 6/23/03; 5:16:45 AM