On 8/17/05, Jake Savin <email@hidden> wrote:
> Please understand how this looks from my point of view as a developer and
> early adopter of the autodiscovery feature. I was one of the first people to
> add support for autodiscovery to deployed software, within literally days of
> Mark's initial proposals. At that time RSS was it (though there was still
> the multiple RSS versions issue and politics around RSS 1.0 vs. 0.9x)...
>
> Anyway, I thought the work was done, the feature appeared to be frozen, and
> I and UserLand moved on to other work. Much later, and rather innocently I
> think, Mark Nottingham pointed out the issue in Safari here on this list,
> and the response from Jessica Kahn, whom I presume is speaking on Apple's
> behalf, is basically that "this is what the spec says to do".
"The spec" (I assume you are referring to the latest draft of the Atom
Autodiscovery spec at
http://www.ietf.org/internet-drafts/draft-ietf-atompub-autodiscovery-01.txt
) says nothing of the sort. On a philosophical level, it can not say
anything of the sort, because it only specifies Atom autodiscovery. I
agree with Phil that a unified feed autodiscovery spec would be nice,
but such a document was outside the scope of the Atom working group.
There are many interesting unanswered questions about RSS, and the
Atom working group showed remarkable resolve and consistency in
tackling precisely none of them.
> I found that a bit surprising, if not even a little disconcerting. How would
> a spec which originated before Atom existed come later to specify that Atom
> should be preferred over RSS? When I discovered that the spec doesn't say
> that, and that in fact it doesn't even mention RSS, I became concerned that
> the changes and/or subsuming of the autodiscovery spec into Atom may have
> been done for political reasons.
The Atom autodiscovery spec does not "subsume" the blog posts that are
generally taken to define RSS autodiscovery.
There is no specification that determines what a client should do if
presented with two autodiscovery links to two different feed formats.
None. Safari's behavior is unsupported by spec, but the exact
opposite behavior would be equally unsupported by spec. There is no
spec.
> I now doubt that this is the case, but
> please recall all of the controversy over the Wikipedia page on RSS for some
> idea about why I became concerned about this.
I have absolutely no idea what you're referring to, and for that I am
eternally grateful.
--
Cheers,
-Mark
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