A Last Stand for RSS

Shelley Powers has taken a look at the RSS controversy du jour and offers a take in a style all her own.
bq.But hark? What’s this? What’s this rumble in the distance. Oh, no! It’s Big Dog, and he’s got his lawyer! But the Lawyer brings no books or suits or habius, or even corpses. He opens the door long enough to make statement, and the moves on to other things that come ten by ten. The statement? Nothing has changed on RSS 2.0. Harvard still owns it, but the community may do what they will within the bounds of a Creative Commons license. Leading to, (now pay attention, this is going to go fast)… – Shelley Powers To me, this whole thing started with a single statement three years ago.
bq.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. – Me Within the next month, the Atom project had begun.
bq.My support is, unsurprisingly, also partly based on politics. The recent flap about funky RSS just highlights the ongoing political quagmire of weblog tech, and the importance of having an open format that is not controlled by a single vendor. Vendor neutrality is particularly important now, as weblogs break into the mainstream. Weblogging is becoming its own industry, one where interoperability can no longer be solved simply by calling up a friend or dashing off a quick email. And one where no one needs to tolerate the sort of FUD we’ve seen in the past few weeks. – Mark Pilgrim RSS never did solve the issues to anyone’s satisfaction. Instead, things only got worse.
bq.It appears that the only company with no plans to release a proprietary version of RSS is Google. – Me Apparently, everyone is supposed to accept that the RSS 2.0 Specification was brought down from the mountaintop after being inscribed on stone tablets by some sort of XML diety. And anyone who questions anything is to be considered some sort of heretical apostate. This attitude has slowed the adoption of RSS for years now. And there has been simply no need for any of this.