When you click a link to a webpage, your browser doesn't automatically bookmark it, right? So why should clicking a link to an RSS feed automatically subscribe you to it? It shouldn't. It should show you the feed, which you could then subscribe to if you like it. How many times have you subscribed to...
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A few weeks ago, the US Supreme Court threw out the case of a man suing to have the words "under God" removed from the Pledge of Allegiance. But they left unanswered the central question of whether having those words in the pledge is a violation of the separation of church and state. Their ruling...
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Yesterday, I posted a proposal to the Atom wiki for a method of specifying details about a person (their name, URL, etc.) once, and referring to it from other places in a feed. The main point was to avoid duplicating data. The original declaration of a person was to have an attribute named "id" (eg....
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A question was asked on the AtomPub WG mailing list to the effect of "what is an entry?" With a conceptual model for what it is that we're trying to create a format for, we can decide what elements and attributes it needs. On a number of occasions, differences of opinion have had at their...
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I could have sworn I'd written about this before. The question has arisen on the AtomPub WG mailing list of whether the <link> element should be dumped and replaced by a number of different elements based on <link>'s @rel values. Ah, and so I have written about it before, on the wiki. Here's a relevant...
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Web guru Jeffrey Zeldman posted an entry in his blog today titled Architecture Digest vs. This Old House. It's content was interesting, but not directly related to the Mental Arc it sparked. That came from the title.

"This Old Website": a web-program (as in "television program", not "computer program") where a few designers get together...
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Referring to Steve Jobs' keynote mentioned in my last entry, The Register notes that "Safari will get Arse-Feed support (both RSS and Atom) in the next version, which the audience met with a stunned silence." The article then proceeds to be stunning silent on the question of what an "arse-feed" is. Was the article's author...
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I read that Steve Jobs made mention of RSS in his WWDC keynote and it sparked a thought. When you get mentioned by important people, you know you're on to something important. When you get mentioned by self-important people, you know you're convincing people that you're on to something important.

Before I get completely misinterpreted...
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My first step into the world of RSS came when it occurred to me to that an RSS feed could keep one of my websites fresh without me having to generate new content. The challenge was to find an appropriate newsfeed. Had my site been tech-oriented, that would have been easy. But the site I...
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Ever since I built CaRP to import news onto one of my websites (I wanted a way to keep it fresh without having to do any work myself), I've been using RSS feeds more and more to shuttle data around my sites. I added code to output RSS feeds from my discussion forums. I set...
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