King of Aggregation

bq.But I disagree when it comes to comments made by Bob Wyman that Atom is going to be king of aggregation in years forward. I don’t think so! – Todd Cochrane I have been a firm supporter of Atom for a while. As long as RSS was just the vision of a single person, and not a true standard, I thought it lacked the robustness necessary to be what everyone truly needed.
bq.Let’s be clear: RSS is in no way broken. I, for example, will be using RSS to monitor this current round of analysis and specification. I don’t really care whether tags are written as mixed-case or lowercase. But there are issues in the core, and issues related to the delineation of the periphery, that do matter to me. RSS will empower me to tune into its own review process in the most efficient way. What’s broken is that not nearly enough people know about, or use, this model of awareness diffusion. That’s a public-relations problem, not a technology problem, and one that I hope will at last be fixed. – Jon Udell It had seemed of late that the standards process might have held Atom back just a bit too long. But perhaps than depended on your definition of RSS.
bq.”Longhorn” will support all common RSS formats, including: RSS 1.0, 2.0 and Atom 0.3. We will support Atom 1.0 when it’s released. – Microsoft So everyone had what they wanted.
bq.As for their list-control extensions, it’s up to the implementors and the market to decide if they’re useful; they look like they won’t break anything, so the experiment is free. I’m somewhat amused by the last paragraph’s “We will support Atom 1.0 when it’s released.” That will be in the next few weeks, which is to say at least a year before Longhorn is. – Tim Bray Except that, as it turns out, it does indeed “break” something.
bq.That title element in the cf:sort element is the one with teeth. My SAX parser goes along, notifying me whenever an element is opened, and again when it is closed, and when the channel opens I say $in_channel = true;, and leave it that way until I see an item open. Then, when I see a title element, if $in_channel is true I use its content as the title for the feed, so I’ll wind up calling that feed “The title of the item.” And since I didn’t invent that style of RSS parsing, I’m not going to be the only one getting bit. – Phil Ringnalda What does our visionary have to say?
bq.To be fair to Microsoft, if these enhancements weren’t so odd, in the way they give elements dual roles depending on their context, and by putting standard RSS 2.0 elements in new contexts where they mean something other than what they mean in their current context, I would encourage people to stand back and let it go. As I said in the session yesterday, “this is what movement looks like.” But I think Microsoft ought to read the feedback carefully, in Phil’s post and what shows up elsewhere, and come up with a simpler way to do what they want to do. I think it’s quite possible to do that. – Dave Winer I don’t enough XML to know if Microsoft is doing something wrong or not. But I can’t help wondering if RSS had been submitted to a standards body long ago, this would not be occuring. And I think Atom will be the beneficiary of that fact after all. Update 1 aka Microsoft is Untrustworthy
bq.Steve, I totally don’t agree that developers have to support the Longhorn aggregator platform. Longhorn has a long way to go before it matters. And Microsoft has to do a lot more before developers should trust them enough to get in a locked trunk where Microsoft controls the air supply. In fact, I don’t think there’s anything they can do to earn that kind of trust. Keep the trunk open, let God the put the air in there, never trust a company to keep you alive. – Dave Winer Update 2 aka Microsoft is Truthworthy
bq.I just spoke with Amar Gandhi and Sean Lyndersay of Microsoft at Gnomedex. They’ll revise their spec in response to concerns reported by Phil Ringnalda. This turns yesterday’s home run into a grand slam. – Dave Winer The only thing I trust is that we don’t know what is going to happen in “years forward.”