* Jake Savin <email@hidden> [2005-08-18 00:10]:
> I'm not arguing that it should withhold a choice if two feeds
> offer differing content. I'd like to try to stick with solving
> the particular problem that Mark Nottingham raised in the first
> place.
But the options you proposed in your previous mail would solve
that particular problem at the detriment of other scenarios.
That’s why I spoke up.
> I believe it's mostly a user interface issue, but however much
> we'd like for there not to be, there *are* political
> ramifications for having the software choose one format over
> the other, if the user has no way of setting their own
> preference. The subtle long-term effect is to promote one
> format over the other, which is something we can probably agree
> should be avoided.
Well, I don’t really agree (see which spec you’ll find my name
on), and outside their News feeds Google don’t seem to either,
and to date, I haven’t seen anyone defend RSS2 on the basis that
it is technically superior in any aspect over Atom.
But I understand if someone else would like to keep out of that
hotbed.
> >There is one somewhat reliable heuristic, which is that when
> >two different autodiscovery links carry the same non-empty
> >title, they can be assumed to be identical. Its practical
> >value is low, though, since this is not currently wide-spread
> >convention among publishers.
>
> That's one I hadn't thought of. I agree that it's probably of
> little practical value right now. Perhaps it's worth thinking
> about a reliable way to decide if two feeds carry identical
> content.
Anything anyone decides on *now* will only affect the future.
There is too little standardization or even just convention in
the area as things stand.
> However this doesn't necessarily solve the problem Mark
> reported, where Safari doesn't know that his news reader only
> understands RSS and sends it an Atom feed instead.
I don’t believe that is a problem which needs to be solved. Any
aggregator which does not support all popular formats is
committing suicide. There are millions of sites which provide
their feed(s) in only one format – which is what they should be
doing, IMO.
> My guess is that switching to RSS2 as the default without
> giving users a choice, would be seen by at least some in the
> Atom camp as playing against them.
I would see it as disappointing, frankly.
Apple know better than a lot of people that good UI design is
about restricting choices, not multiplying them. The same
principle applies almost universally to design of any kind,
including that of APIs and data formats. Atom is good because
it’s all about removing unnecessary options and standardizing on
one right way to do things.
> On Aug 16, 2005, at 4:35 PM, Sam Ruby wrote:
> >Click on the orange icon in lower right of the window. You are
> >presented with a choice between "Subscribe to 'XML.com
> >Articles and Weblogs'" and "Subscribe to 'XML.com Articles and
> >Weblogs'". No difference in titles. One happens to be in Atom
> >1.0 format. The other happens to be in RSS 2.0 format.
> >
> >Firefox will happily consume both.
>
> Very cool. I didn't know this was the case in FireFox, though I
> probably should have. Do any of the rest of you see this kind
> of behavior as a viable solution for Safari?
Other than the unresolved issue of requiring a choice between
multiple identical feeds in different formats, it is certainly a
very viable UI for providing the user with a selection of all the
possible offerings.
And this particular case is one where the “unify on link title”
heuristic would produce exactly the desired results.
> If a website only provides a link to one format, then all of
> the users whose software supports only some other format (s)
> will be out of luck. I think many non-technical users would
> just say to themselves at that point, "Oh too bad, this site
> doesn't have a feed. I guess I won't be reading it." Not good,
> IMHO.
They will be out of luck in so many cases that they will sooner
or later switch aggregators. As I said above, an aggregator which
lacks support for one or more popular formats is committing
suicide. Even so, the desperate can find a multitude of free
thirdparty services online which convert from one format to
another.
> 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. 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.
As Phil explained, this happened because there *are* *no*
normative documents that the spec could have referenced, because
There Is No RSS Autodiscovery Spec.
There is just a bunch of conventions everyone adheres to, but it
would be *inappropriate* for a normative document to talk about
them in any fashion. They are just conventions; a normative spec
for an unrelated format cannot talk about them without elevating
itself to a semi-/normative reference about them in the process.
*That* would be a case of the Atom autodiscovery spec subsuming
RSS autodiscovery – not the current situation, wherein the Atom
autodiscovery spec talks about Atom autodiscovery and stays mum
about RSS autodiscovery. If you want to do RSS autodiscovery per
the popular convention, there is nothing in the Atom spec which
prevents you from that.
> I suppose my real hope would be that the autodiscovery spec
> could stand on its own, outside of the context of the Atom
> spec/draft, and that it would explicitly support all of the
> major syndication formats.
Then ask the RSS community to produce normative documents, an
official MIME type and the other scaffolding that’s necessary
for a spec to build onto. It isn’t any sort of real effort, it’s
just evidently and expressly refused, for no good reason.
> Also, please don't take this as a loaded question, but how was
> the decision made to incorporate autodiscovery into the Atom
> draft in the first place? Or is that not what happened?
The point is that there was no autodiscovery spec. And the Atom
WG recognized that having an autodiscovery mechanism is a
practical necessity, so the WG set out and created a spec for
autodiscovery which keeps its nose entirely out of the RSS
territory by addressing the needs of Atom and *only* the needs of
Atom.
There is nothing that prevents anyone doing autodiscovery for
Atom from doing autodiscovery for RSS the way it’s always been
done.
This is a display of neutrality, not subsumption.
Regards,
--
Aristotle Pagaltzis // <http://plasmasturm.org/>
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