It's even worse than it appears.
Getting ready for a little trip, just a couple of days, want to be sure I can update my blog from my laptop. That's what this little test is for. #
Oh what the Repubs are doing to the United States. And you're depending on keeping everyone fooled forever.#
I watched the first ten minutes of last night's NBA Finals game and switched it off. Too painful. For now Golden State is unbeatable. I'll watch the beginning of the next game to see if anything is different. #
A few years ago, in 2012, I tried an experiment, publishing RSS semantics using JSON syntax, to see what would happen, much like the experiment that got RSS started in 1997. I wanted to see if there was interest among developers for a JSON version of RSS. I put up a website, with comments, and added a JSON feed to my blog (technically it was JSONP). Wired even asked me to write a piece about it. #- Not much happened with the feed, but the comments underneath the post were quite impressive, especially now, five years later. #
- Then my friends Brent Simmons and Manton Reece, two developers with a strong interest in syndication (Brent wrote NetNewsWire and Manton is currently working on micro.blog) published a spec for a format they call JSON Feed. It was supported immediately by Brent's blog, inessential.com, and the Macintosh community central blog, Daring Fireball. It was off to a strong start. #
- I had mixed feelings about this, and wrote it up in a post a couple of days after the format was announced. I was concerned about whether there was demand for JSON syntax among people who actually produce feeds and write software that consumes feeds. I understand how developers feel, but how many of them are responsible for the flow of RSS-based news? I was also concerned because they were creating new names for things that already existed in RSS 2.0. I had the same concern with Atom, many years ago. Why not start with the same names, and add to them where needed. #
- Aside: I observed that even though Islam, Christianity and Judaism are different religions, their holy books have many of the same stories, and the characters have the same names. If they can do it, presumably to allow some level of interop, why can't technology? It can, imho and must.#
- Many of these ideas were expressed in my manifesto, Rules for standards-makers, which came out shortly before the release of Brent and Manton's spec (a coincidence, there was no connection, I wrote the piece in anticipation of a podcasting conference at Harvard in early May).#
- But there was interest in the JSON Feed format as evidenced by the long list of comments on the GitHub site where it is being discussed. #
- So I thought about it, and while I was working on Old School, my new blogging platform, I decided to detour for a couple of days to review my RSS-generating code, and to add parallel code that generates a JSON-syntax feed with exactly the same semantics as the RSS version. I wrote that up here, on May 30. In that piece I promised to write more and to provide some technical details about how the format is constructed. #
- https://github.com/scripting/Scripting-News/tree/master/rss-in-json#
- It took longer to write than I thought it would, probably because it's a very short document. I had able help from my friend Allen Wirfs-Brock, who has a lot of experience editing technical specs, having worked on just that at Microsoft and Mozilla. #
- What do I hope happens? Well, whatever was meant to happen. 🎈#