TV producers love to "push the envelope", and as a result, the moral quality of television programming has gone way down in my lifetime. There's not much outside of the News Hour with Jim Lehrer that isn't offensive these days. The "Hootergate" incident during the Super Bowl, if it was intentional (which wouldn't surprise the...
[read more]

As I read the discussions, arguments, specs, histories, etc. of RSS and Atom, it becomes more and more apparent that the principals behind these formats are primarily focused on blogging. That's fine, of course. But I can't help but get the impression that decisions regarding the formats and APIs are being made in such a...
[read more]

I read an article at News.Com yesterday about Google "spurning" RSS in favor of Atom. Google, which acquired Blogger last year, is only allowing former paying customers who were already publishing their blogs in RSS format to use RSS going forward. New feeds can only be in Atom format.

I fully support their right to...
[read more]

I sat down this morning and composed version 1 of the mission statement for Info Bite List (the Info Bite file format):

"Info Bite List enables the publication and flexible use of collections and lists of data of many kinds while minimizing bandwidth requirements and promoting interoperability and flexibility through an extendable, XML-based format."

Perhaps...
[read more]

Saturday was the deadline for entries in the contest to choose a colloquial name for RSS (so "rename RSS" isn't quite accurate), and now it's time to vote. My personal favorite, as you might guess from this blog's name, is "Info Bite List". But part of me wants another name to be chosen so that...
[read more]

Rather than brave the turbulent waters of altering the RSS specifications or try to change the direction of the emerging Atom specification, either of which is likely to be an exercise in futility, and perhaps not even desirable, I'm considering coming up with yet another content syndication specification. Foolhardy? Maybe. Will any tools support it?...
[read more]

I had a few more thoughts on the Cloud interface that appeared in the RSS 2.0 spec, so I'll lump them together in this post.

* First, I just checked the spec, and it doesn't state that subscriptions expire every 25 hours, but another document (which the spec links to) does state that "by convention",...
[read more]

Here's a question--could the Atom API be packaged as an extension to RSS? I'd have to read the spec to see where the mismatches might be, but I would think that at least a subset of the API could be made to work with RSS. That way, a site that has standardized on RSS as...
[read more]

I read an article today, 'Killer Culture': A call to the churches, that talked about the corporate influence of the media in our culture. It's ironic that a lot of the people who are so vocal in their condemnation of corporate influence in politics (which I'm not condoning--just making a point) have been totally snowed...
[read more]

Another way to reduce the size of a newsfeed in cases where more than one element often contains the same data would be to introduce the concept of element aliasing or defaults. For example, if the guid is almost always (or always, or even just often) the same as the link, then the feed could...
[read more]