Smalltalk Tidbits, Industry Rants

Scoble responds to last night's rant about OPML:

James, here's the deal. I really don't care about specs. I'm a user here. When users say they want something the correct answer isn't to call what they are asking for "crappy" but it is to either say "here's what you're asking for" or it's to say "here's what you're asking for and I made it even better." Or, I guess an OK response would be "I can't do that, sorry."

Well. You don't care about specs as a user. In the abstract, that's correct - you don't. However, you actually do care when it starts hitting you as a user. Consider the field of blog posting tools, all (or nearly all) of which have to deal with the utter atrocity known as MetaWebLog API. As with OPML, it's underspecified, and each implementor has to figure out what Winer thought he meant.

You know what I had to do to get my client and server implementations working? I had to download multiple posting tools, and start hitting my server with them. And working with other people using other tools. And debugging my test server live as requests came in, so that I could see what they actually did, as opposed to what I thought they did based on the sorry excuse for a spec. Based on other posts I've seen, I know that other authors have gone through the same exact problem.

OPML has the same problems associated with it. It's underspecified, and it has way, way too much extraneous crap floating around in it. Which means - as a user - you'll care when you notice that there are subtle interoperability bugs between tools. When those start to crop up, you'll blissfully blame the tool author, having long since forgotten that said tool author is likely pulling his hair out trying to read Winer's mind.

Do I have a better format? No, I don't really do formats, or specs. But I'll say one thing - for all the crap I've given the Atom movement, their spec is easy to implement. Reading their docs, I know what it is - as an implementor - I'm supposed to do. Which is something I've never been able to say about OPML, or MetaWebLog API. Or, to expand the field to other lame specs, Blogger API (where, to be fair, the authors recognized the problem).

You can have a look at the WikiPedia page for an idea of what the consensus view on OPML is.

Finally, there's this request from Scoble:

I am a user. I'll leave those discussions to the developers. But, as a user, I don't really give a flying leap. I see the feature I want. I see that someone has done it by hand to get what they want. I want even more. Are you gonna give it to me? Fine. If not, then can you stay out of the process please?

None of us implementors can give you anything worthwhile so long as we have to deal with utter crap. I'm writing code in this space - both on the server side, and on the client side. So no, I'll stay in the process, thank you very much.

Update: Comments from James Kew and Gary Short. I'll also add this, following on from Robert's "put up or shut up" dare - it reminds me of the oh so common political argument that devolves down to "I care more, so you're facts don't matter". Sigh.