Protocols and Implementations
Dave Winer is writing today about Blogging formats and protocols in May 2003. I have been citing Dave quite often lately, but I think that is because he always has interesting things to say. I also have yet to finish getting my notes from the Florida Electronic Library Conference posted but this brings up something I want to talk about here. At the conference, there was a lot of discussion of Z39.50 and NCIP, and XML was mentioned. But nowhere in the presentations did RSS come up at all. And it doesn’t really surprise me. Library software vendors tend to focus on standards (at least in my experience) like MARC that are the results of work performed by standards bodies. They also tend to take a while to implement. Fluid standards like RSS and the Blogger APIs are simply advancing too quickly right now for those vendors to keep up. And they won’t do it without users demanding those features. Of course, that goes for the regular standards as well. The one part I didn’t understand is what he meant by Six Apart and Blogger not doing “RSS exactly as UserLand does.” Maybe RSS needs a standards body, after all.
