November 17th, 2008
I agree with Tim Bray (via Eric Garrido (via Bill de hÓra)). USB is an awesome standard because it “just works.” Ever debugged a USB stick?
A big step towards making RSS as clean and efficient is to drop the old, crusty RSS flavors and just use Atom. That’s what OGC has been doing more and more, and that’s why this site advertises only an Atom feed, even though it uses Wordpress and could easily advertise more.
To be quite honest, does anyone even notice? With the leading RSS readers picking up pretty much anything, I just can’t see where it matters between RSS, Atom, or whatever else might be out there.
Care to explain the differences?
The differences aren’t that big a deal (except that RSS 2 is RDF, not XML). There are 2 major issues. Sure, the leading RSS readers support all 3 formats, but if a small developer wants to build a cool new reader for, say, a phone, their development cost is almost triple what it would be if there was only one format to support.
Second, Atom is the only one that supports a clean way to extend the format. This is how we added location information to RSS, and other groups want to extend it in different ways. For example, the library and archiving community wants to add MARC (http://www.loc.gov/marc/) information.
It’s not a huge deal, but annoying enough to be important, especially with the huge adoption of RSS for so many different uses.
Were you aware that there is yet another standard being developed for use with mobile devices. The xmpp group are developing a ‘location’ extension for xmpp. The idea is to use it from a mobile device to geocode a location based on its characteristics. There are two extensions being proposed XEP-0255 (http://xmpp.org/extensions/xep-0255.html) and XEP-0080 (http://xmpp.org/extensions/xep-0080.html).
I have told them about GML, but a little ‘coaxing’ from OGC might help.
Keith