Permanent link to archive for 2/8/04. Sunday, February 8, 2004
Mini-editorial on Syndication in February 2004

We should welcome Atom back into the fold. It should be seen as a flavor of RSS. If there are important features missing from RSS, add them through a new namespace called Atom. But look first to see if RSS already does what you want. There haven't been many ideas in Atom that aren't just reinventions of ideas already specified in RSS.

It should be said now, before anything is final, that it's still not too late to do the right thing for low-cost broadly available information tools. This has never been about the big companies, they didn't create RSS, or the aggregators, or the tools that generate the feeds. It's so like big technology companies to come into the space and try to dictate terms to us, and even to smear the reps of the people who are in their way. If history is a guide, their effort will be wasted, because the Internet has its own idea of how this stuff works.

And companies who blame their troubles on developers are small companies hiding inside big ones. Their futures are very limited.

# Posted by Dave Winer on 2/8/04; 7:47:09 AM - --