>-----Original Message-----
>From: Michael Champion [mailto:mc@x...] 
>Sent: Monday, February 02, 2004 12:04 PM
>To: XML DEV
>Subject: Re: [xml-dev] best practice for providing newsfeeds ?
>
>As best as I understand from watching the food fight from a 
>distance, there's no dispute that RSS works fine in the 
>current world where the content is almost all human-readable 
>and the parsing is extremely liberal.  The question is whether 
>this success will continue once serious businesspeople get 
>into the act, when real money is at stake, when lots of people 
>start syndicating information that is mostly processed by 
>machines (calendars and schedules data that would be pulled 
>from a feed into Outlook, perhaps, or financial information 
>that might be acted on by some sort of 'bot), and as people 
>want to move away from liberal parsing towards content format 
>contracts.  The "simplicity" of the RSS specs looks like 
>underspecification to someone who wants to be able to 
>reject/ignore a message if it does not meet a rigorous 
>understanding of what information is there and how to find it.

I am amused to think that you believe that ATOM will solve this problem.
ATOM's confusion of features (allowing sending arbitrary MIME types,
entries have three different dates as metadata, allowing escaped markup,
overuse of the <link> tag, etc) will open lead to just as many open
questions as RSS has had in the past. 

The only difference is that I suspect the ATOM folks will be more likely
to update the spec as issues are found [hopefully they'll have some sort
of errata process] as opposed to pretending the spec is perfect and
freezing it as has happened with the RSS specs that came before it. 

PS: Once serious business people get into the act? LOL. So Rolling
Stone, Microsoft, Oracle, Sun, the New York Times, Yahoo, etc don't
count as serious business people? I see the ATOM FUDsters have gotten to
you too. 

--
PITHY WORDS OF WISDOM 
The heaviest burden a man can carry is a chip on his shoulder.


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