John Robb is not exactly an impartial bystander, you know. The difference between what Sam Ruby's current effort and Dave Winer's is not that one has business interests and the other doesn't. Rather, it is that one has the support and good-will of the community and the other, well, doesn't. BTW, if you don't think RSS 2.0 could stand improvements, take a look at Sam's wiki. The fact that so many people have proposed so many different ideas should indicate something (although I would say 90% of what has been suggested so far I would rather keep out of the emerging "standard"). Disclaimer: My opinions, not those of my employer, etc.

Comment on Surprise surprise by James Robertson

I'm cynical about the effort - not for the reasons Jon is (I think they stray awfully close to tinfoil hat territory). I'm cynical mainly because I see no point to it. I look at the examples, and I say "hey, just like RSS, but with the tag names gratuitously changed". So far, it has all the look (to me) of a bunch of people with way too much free time on their hands.

Yes, the differences look superficial, but they are not. Insisting that the root element is in a namespace allows embedding of this format in another XML format. Likewise, assigning an ID to each "post"/"entry"/"whatever" is essential to be able to create cross-blog links that do not depend on volatile, web-only, "permalinks" (not to mention that they make tracking changes to a post easier). etc.

> Rather, it is that one has the support and > good-will of the community and the other, > well, doesn't. This only holds if you adopt a self-serving definition of "the community". What you've just written is only an accurate statement if you define the community as being composed of those individuals and groups who are contributing to the Pie/Echo effort. That sort of definition is convenient in that it excludes everyone but the handfull of people currently contributing to Pie/Echo. Realize, at the very least, however, that we're talking about a very small, self-selected group of folks. If you do not support what they're doing, then obviously you're not going to stick your head in there. This creates the illusion of a consensus that forward motion is required and that the folks involved are the right people to lead the effort. Now, if you were to consider the much, much wider community of people who use tools that produce or consume syndicated feeds (or use syndication for other purposes) and the totality of people who write syndication-related tools, and users of syndication-related tools, you'd have to acknowledge that the picture is very different w/re to who has the "trust" of "the community".

Comment on A sharp eye to see the differences by James Robertson

You can embed 2.0 in another doc now - you get multiple channel elements - much as you now get multiple item elements in a feed. I'm not sure why that's hard, but hey - invent all the new stuff you want, and then watch the inertia problem in action.

Comment on Whose community? by James Robertson

I personally have no idea whether the "community" of RSS producers and consumers trusts the people doing echo/pie. My own opinion (clearly on display here) is that it's mostly a harmless waste of time and effort - RSS, for good or ill - is being widely adopted now. adding a new format will effectively be one more flavor that aggregators have to support - and it will take years for the new format to get real traction (if it ever does). For the most part, this looks to me like a solution in search of a problem.

My understanding (from reading Sam's site over the past few months) is that Sam wants a RESTful, SOAPy weblogging API that can use the syndication format as the body of the message. That's just one application of the sydication format. Other people want to embed their RSS feed in their XHTML pages, but can't do it in a way that makes sense to most XML parsers. To enable these sorts of new applications, you have to have a namespace for your syndication format. Developers who work extensivly with XML asked for a namespace and got one for a brief period of time, but Dave quickly withdrew it. Is it all about a namespace? No, but a namespace would've helped console those developers who want to integrate RSS into new XML formats. (FWIW, Dave recently hinted that he'd be willing to try a namespace again, but I didn't see any follow-through.) I'm pretty certain that Sam will keep the momentum going so that they have an API in place shortly.