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Checking in with Mr Safe
Mr Safe: You're Dave Winer aren't you? Me: Yup. Mr Safe: Tim Bray said you're all washed up, kind of like Charles Goldfarb. Me: Yup. Mr Safe: Why am I talking to you? Me: Tim was wrong. Mr Safe: Why did he say something so nasty about you? There must be something wrong with you? Me: I think Tim basically means well. He looked at RSS and thought "Wow that's really simple, I can make that better." What he didn't know is that there are all kinds of XML gods gathered around RSS thinking the same thing. So when Tim said Dave is dead, they all said "Wow, now I can be Dave. Right on." The problem is that they can't all be Dave, in fact none of them can be, because there's only one me. Mr Safe: Dave, why don't you just take a hike. We don't need or want your personality. You're a jerk. You're not a nice person. No one likes you. Neener neener! Me: Hmmm. That doesn't sound like you Mr Safe. Mr Safe: Someone made me say that. Me: What did you really mean? Mr Safe: What role do you play in this stuff? Me: I co-designed RSS 0.91, and designed the extensions that built on it, 0.92 and 2.0, with the help of a few other people. Mr Safe: Wouldn't it be better if a community designed it? Me: Nice idea, but format and protocol design doesn't actually work that way no matter what some open development advocates say. They're mostly well-intentioned people, many of them users like Larry Lessig, who want software to work for them, without the usual tricks that software developers play to lock them in. I share that goal, totally. But people like Eric Raymond and Richard Stallman have told them that they have figured out how to design software without a designer, but unfortunately their technique only works for cloning ideas that have already been designed. When it comes to new ideas, like RSS was in the late 90s, you need to have a designer, or at most two or three. Someone who makes the decisions, that, for better or worse, people live with. There are always different ways to do it, but at some point the arguing has to end if you want to get anywhere. In RSS, the basic argument ended in 1999, with RSS 0.91. That's the safe choice, Mr Safe. If you don't want to stick your neck out, and get embroiled in a full-scale Internet flamewar, you just can't go wrong with 0.91. You will probably get a few emails from RDF zealots telling you you're an idiot, but it's safe to ignore those emails, many have before you, and they're still alive and they still have their jobs. In other words, they're safe, like you want to be. Mr Safe: But what if my application needs more than RSS 0.91 provides? Me: Well, then you have a choice, and you probably can't go very wrong either way you go. You could add some RDF "syntactic sugar" to your feed and then use elements from namespaces to add the extra bits that you need. If you like that approach, you'd ask the RSS-DEV mail list how to proceed, which, imho, really is the RDF-DEV mail list. Mr Safe: What's the other approach? Me: There's a format called RSS 2.0, which is a strict superset of RSS 0.91. Its designed to be as safe as RSS 0.91 with more power. RSS 2.0 relaxes some of the limits of 0.91 and adds optional elements that have proven useful in a bunch of RSS applications. What's nice about RSS 2.0 is that if everyone uses the extra elements it specifies, we all interoperate, and users have choice, there's no lock-in. That's very good for people who want safety, especially users who are worried the blogging tools vendor they like may be acquired by Evil Software Inc next week, or some other terrible thing might happen. RSS 2.0 is cool because it's all specified in one place, written in simple non-technical English that your VP-Business Development could probably understand. It's the ultimate in safety because it's frozen. It can't change. And people are respecting that, even the people who want to rock and roll. Hallelujah. Mr Safe: How did Tim Bray miss that? Me: I don't know. I thought he was a smart guy. Maybe he's all washed up? 
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Last update: Monday, July 7, 2003 at 6:31:42 AM Pacific. |
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