Tuesday, March 09, 2004

Phillip Pearson: High performance XML-RPC. 

NPR: "Astronomers today unveiled what they say is the deepest portrait of the visible universe ever captured." 

NY Daily News: "Women are quickly catching up." 

Library Stuff has a neat picture. Go get em librarians. We love you! 

Sjoerd Visscher: "If you are doing liberal XML parsing, you are being inconsiderate." 

NY Times: "Well-educated technology workers have long been at the forefront of American economic growth and innovation. But some of them can't find jobs." 

TechRepublic and Builder.Com both have new RSS 2.0 feeds. 

According to Rebecca Rippin, this week Portal Universia, the Hispanic world's largest university portal (over 700 partner universities across Spain, Portugal, Mexico, Brazil, Peru, Chile, Argentina, Venezuela, Colombia, Puerto Rico) has included RSS in its elearning section. 

RSS is raging 

Every day it seems another monster application of RSS comes on line. Most of it is RSS 2.0, occasionally an earlier version, 0.91, 0.92 or 1.0. But usually it's 2.0.

My philosophy is that the time to make an offer is when you're strongest, because that's when it's most likely to work. It's also the time that tech people seem least likely to make the offer. For example, Apple finally became interested in working with developers, seriously, in its darkest moments in 1996. Same with Netscape in 1999, and then the Dean campaign in early 2004. It seems to be human nature to wait until it's too late, when the battle is lost, as a desperate last measure. But working together is a great way to cement victory.

Now that RSS is ascending so powerfully, I want to make an offer on its behalf. It would be easy to say that other formats don't matter, but even if I believe that, the community is better off if we have one format we're all promoting; as opposed to having continued arguments about whether "issued" is better than "pubDate". The truth is that neither is better or worse. If it works it's good.

So from this strength, I've outlined a plan to merge RSS and Atom, much the same way we merged UserLand's format with Netscape's format in 1999. By making this offer to the Atom people I'm giving them a chance to get out of conflict with RSS. I think it's something users can support. I hope they get together and make a serious counter. Why shouldn't they?

It's pretty clear RSS is over the top, no matter what the Atom people do. Google is powerful, but they're not so powerful that they can compete with the ever increasing mountain of support for RSS. And why should they pick a fight with RSS? It's a format. It's not stealing any revenue from them. None of their jobs depend on wiping out RSS. It makes no sense to fight with it. If RSS were weak, they might be able to capture it, lock up the new format with patents, but that just isn't going to happen. RSS is too strong.

So here's the chance to do something good for the Internet, something not evil. Let's go Google, let's go SixApart, it's time to bury the hatchet and move on. Joi Ito, you're famous for being an advocate of peace. RSS is here to stay and so are Google and Movable Type. Let's all acknowledge that and stop this fight now.