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Today's hike was at the Arnold Arboretum.  The agenda for tomorrow's conference. Doc arrives in Boston. At 4PM I've arrived at the Sheraton, going down to the bar for drinks with Doc and Halley. The Sunday Times (London) gives credit to bloggers for bringing down the Times (New York) executive editor and managing editor. They also say the young screwed up reporter who stayed home while pretending to cover the stories he was assigned was doing cocaine. Standards?  I read a piece yesterday about SixApart and their standards compliance. Interesting, but they do RSS in a funky way. I guess they are picky about which standards they support and how. They respect the W3C, but they don't respect RSS. My opinion of course (but then I co-designed RSS). They wouldn't like it if UserLand or Blogger or someone else played funky games with their creation, Trackback. Maybe they would. They haven't responded to the piece I wrote about this. Tim Berners-Lee isn't the only one working for a better tomorrow (through recommendations btw, not standards). And some would argue that TBL's vision is unattainable. (I am one of those people.) What SixApart really should say is that they're following TBL's roadmap. It's a stretch to call that "standards." I wish they'd take the high road and focus on features and performance, and not polarize the users about interop, which is something not to be competitive about, but to help each other about. It gets nasty when people bring commercial interests into this stuff. Did I co-design RSS? Yes I did. People who say otherwise should be asked to substantiate their claim or withdraw it. If they work for the W3C, I am told by other people at the W3C, they should say whether they speak for the W3C or themselves. It does not matter if there was prior art, such as CDF or MCF. It also does not matter that I experimented with them. I don't claim to be the exclusive designer of RSS, co-design credit goes to several people at Netscape, not just Libby and Guha, who are the only ones who have spoken since Netscape disappeared. The evidence is clear in the difference between 0.90 and 0.91. Most of the new features came from scriptingNews format, which predates Netscape's work by over a year. Netscape acknowledged our contribution. We stopped working on our format and threw our weight behind the joint format, RSS 0.91. If others want to spin it some other way, that's a problem, of course, but it doesn't change what actually happened. Now, does this give me ownership of RSS? Of course not. The copyright notice on UserLand's RSS spec specifically disclaims ownership in the format, while retaining a copyright on the spec. I don't own it any more than Evan owns the common API we use, or Ben and Mena own the Trackback protocol. RSS could get very simple if it weren't for some relative newcomers who want to keep it from being simple, for reasons known only to them. That Movable Type uses this as a competitive tool is totally wrong. I can't believe that if they understood how this happened that they would be doing what they're doing. |
 
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