An early draft of my RSS feed state document. I'm hoping to create a one stop shop for writing RSS reader and publishing code, so that we can avoid the repeated RSS doesn't scale non-sense. Looking for feedback.
Excerpt: Of late, the blogosphere has been alive w/ claims that RSS doesn't scale. This started when Chad Dickerson, CTO of Inforworld, wrote an article called "RSS Growing Pains," where he explained that RSS traffic at Infoworld was out of control. Dare Obasanjo, jumped to the rescue of RSS and showed how Inforworld was incorrectly using RSS. Then, less than two months later, Robert Scoble wrote his famous piece claiming "RSS is broken." Later Sara Williams admitted that Scoble's claims were exaggerated.
The problem w/ RSS is it's simplicity. Developers can quickly write RSS feeds and publish content in record time. And this is great. This is why RSS is the future of the Web. The problems occur when software developers write bad code to publish and pull RSS feeds from the Web. It would be great if the RSS advisory board had a FAQ section that told us how to properly publish and pull RSS feeds, but this hasn't happened. As such, I've set out to do exactly this. Show the busy developer how to properly publish and pull RSS content from the Web.
Don't think that I'm inventing a new wheel here. Everything in this document is already used by some RSS software. Everything has already been specified int he various RSS specifications, notes and HTTP specifications and extensions. Further, this is a living document that will describe the most widely used mechanisms for providing state to RSS feeds. I want the reader to think about this document and respond w/ his thoughts, especially where my thoughts are not the same as the mainstream thinking. Please send feedback and ERRATA to me.
