One of the many bones of contention in RSS is the introduction of new elements that duplicate the purpose of existing elements. For example, many feeds use content:encoded in the place of description. Is it better to embrace existing elements, or to extend the format with similar elements?

What is the motivation for using elements...
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Last month I posted an entry here about Promoting valid newsfeeds. For the past few days, a discussion has been going full steam on the Atom syntax mail list about what to do with invalid feeds. The discussion began with the suggestion that Atom feeds include a URI that client software can contact if it...
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From the what is it good for? department: might there be a use for digest formats as a software delivery mechanism, for example, for updating virus definitions, updating SPAM filters, and delivering software patches? The idea sounds useful, but there would be a few requirements to make it work.

First, the vision. Digests could easily...
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Potential problems with bandwidth consumption are a frequent theme on Info Bite. I haven't run into a problem with it myself, and today, I took steps to postpone any problems even further by moving to a faster server on a faster connection. Does this mean I'll finally stop harping on the issue? Nope. I still...
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When defining a file format like Atom, a balance must be struck between simplicity and power. If the format is too complex, people will have trouble making tools to use it. If it's too simple, it won't be useful for the things people want to do with it. Good design will yield maximal power with...
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Part of me wants blogging tools to explicitly support cross posting (posting the same item in multiple blogs), and part of me is afraid of what will happen if they do. I hope they do it, carefully.

Of course, anyone can copy their entry from one blog and paste it into another. And many blogs...
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Version 1.3 of the Info Bite List specification saw daylight on Saturday. Along with a few other tweaks, I removed support for multipart content types as a result of some research prompted by an entry on Tim Bray's blog.

On Friday, Tim raised the issue of how one goes about posting, for example, an image...
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Yesterday was the deadline for those of us in the United States to file our tax returns for last year. As I looked at that date, April 15, on my blog, I had an idea. An idea of April Fools magnitude. Rather than filing a tax return every year, we could just put our tax...
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A few days ago I read that someone is integrating Bayesian filtering into a newsfeed aggregator (sorry, I can't find the reference). Last month, I wrote about the difficulty of finding quality newsfeeds and proposed some ideas for creating a better newsfeed directory (and then built a newsfeed directory based on those ideas). Bayesian filtering...
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A few days ago, I mentioned in passing the idea of referring to RSS, Atom, Info Bite and such as "digest formats". The idea has grown on me.

What does "digest" mean? A few relevant definitions include: "a periodical that summarizes the news", "something that is compiled (as into a single book or file)", "make...
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