Tim Bray writes that "the IESG has approved the creation of the 'AtomPub Working Group'". While this doesn't technically finalize the decision over whether to go to the IETF, the general consensus seems to be that that's where we want to go, and I imagine we'll do so without further discussion. Thanks to the W3C...
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Okay, so the war isn't over yet, but the winner is going to be...not RSS 1.0, not RSS 2.0, and not Atom, but the user. In fact the user has already won, and will win more and more as the combatants improve and/or the tools for accessing them improve and/or more and better feeds become...
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It is generally presumed that an RSS or Atom feed is the counterpart of a blog, news site, etc., or is aggregated from other feeds that are. The current Atom format specification even goes so far as to require each entry to have a link pointing to an "alternate representation" of the entry. Digests certainly...
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A few days ago, I read that Dave Winer had offered the W3C the keys to RSS if Atom goes to the IETF. Today, I'll indulge in wild speculations on the subject.

First, why would Dave make the offer? The source quoted Dave as saying:

1) He didn't expect they'd accept the offer.

2) He...
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The Atom syntax mail list has been busy recently. Issues that were discussed at length (long before I got involved) have been reopened, and if previous decisions are overturned, big changes may be in store. I heard that the size of the mail list has ballooned significantly since the push to join either IETF or...
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As a side note to an issue that arose on the Atom syntax mail list yesterday, I'd like to rant a little about the variety of linebreaking conventions in use today.

Operating systems and internet standards define a variety of ways to indicate a linebreak. UNIX uses a newline (a.k.a. linefeed) character. Windows uses a...
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A proposal was added to the Atom wiki this morning for drastically simplifying the options for what types of content can appear in an Atom feed. My first reaction was, "Woah! Let's not hamstring the format!" But the more I think about it, the more I like it. The proposal suggests limiting content constructs, whic...
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When you visit some people's blogs, you'll see a list of links to the blogs they read running down the side of the screen. How useful is this list? How could it be improved?

Educating the world on which digests are the most worthy to get a share of their time is one of the...
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I just got back from a long weekend at Zion National Park, and spent a few hours catching up on 'net reading. I started downloading email and saw that I had 260 messages coming. Ugh! Maybe I should take another vacation. 130 or so were SPAM, and were automatically shunted off to a junk mail...
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When one installs a newsfeed reader, it often comes with a default set of newsfeeds already subscribed. As feed readers get integrated into operating systems (or should I say, operating environments), or begin to come pre-installed on computers, the opportunity arises to do some very good things using the default subscriptions. I have a dream...
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