The RSS Blog

News and commentary from the RSS and OPML community.

This last week, the rss-public message board exploded in controversy. The biggest of which is my assertion that sorting items by reverse chronological order is an RSS convention and that attribute extensions should specifically be allowed in RSS. The biggest dissentor is Dave Winer who has refused to be specific about exactly what he think I said is absolutely not true, even thought I've asked him twice.

More than 3 years ago, Dave Winer asked me what I'd do if I were on the RSS advisory board. Dave then repeatedly said that the role of the RSS Advisory Board is to answer questions about RSS. Go thru any of the various RSS mailing lists and tell me who has consistantly answered user questions. That would be me and only me. And yet Dave attacks me.

Honestly, I thank Dave for giving us blogs and RSS, but when someone attacks you for trying to help users, then he is nothing less than an asshole unnice guy. Especially when he won't admit why he attacked you.

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Dave realized that his original statement was false and now he is simply trying to save face by avoiding further explanation.

Once Dave adopted the position that no one should tell people what the spec means, including himself, he became an obstacle to be routed around.
If Dave's original statement were false, then the notion of having the Feed Validator issue a warning when it encountered items out of order would not be controversial.

RSS 2.0 is what it is.  The way forward is with a new syndication format, with a new name.

There's a big difference between convention and something that belongs in the validator. For instance, it's convention to put the other elements of <channel> before the <item>s. You wouldn't validate that either.

Randy

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