Version Numbers
When I first saw Tim’s What Dave Said, my first reaction was to view this as classic Stockholm Syndrome. This whole episode has been bizarre, starting with the same person who sold the same Brooklyn Bridge to a half a dozen people acusing Rogers of being entrepreneurial enough to treat it as a property to be flipped. First stating that No one has the exclusive right to determine the path forward, then taking it upon himself to pick up and bang the gavel. And now Tim’s post.
Then I slept on it. And in the morning, it started to make some sense. It reminded me of another time, years ago...
The current version of Apache Tomcat is 5.5.15. Two prior versions are still supported It wasn’t always that way. Six years ago, there was a messy fight between those that were maintaining Tomcat version 3 and those working on a version 4. This stressful situation lead James Duncan Davidson to pen Rules for Revolutionaries. It talked about how attempting to force differing approaches onto a numeric and ordered scale increases social friction. We saw a similar situation in the syndication space when RSS 0.94 was renamed 2.0.
The IETF AtomPub working group internalized that knowledge and respected the roadmap, leading to a tentative endorsement by Dave Winer (note: the effort was known as Echo at that time). Also note that that endorsement merely acknowledged that another effort was underway, it was emphatically not an acknowledgment that the the effort was in any way be treated as a successor to RSS 2.0.
The situation is fractal. The issues that arise in a 3.0 vs 4.0 discussion apply equally to a 2.0.1 vs 2.0.2 discussion.
Early drafts of the new spec referred to “its predecessor”. This language was removed, but the version number was bumped.
Quite frankly, both are acts of social violence.
Rogers makes the case that all podcasters relying on multiple enclosures will be publishing RSS feeds that don’t work for what is potentially their largest audience, and Dave pleads for Rogers to “decide whether you’re working on a profile or a new format”.
To this, I say, What Dave Said, though I will voice my preference on the two options that Dave puts on the table.
Footnote: I have a pet peeve concerning the use of the term ”RSS” without further qualification. Depending on the content, it means non-RDF versions of RSS, or all syndication formats that call themselves RSS, or all popular syndication formats. In many cases, such ambiguous statements end up implying things that simply aren’t true.
Yikes. This is turning into a soap opera (as opposed to a SOAP opera ... oh nevermind). I’m not sure I want to invest the time to separate the Players from the Story.
To offer my doubtless inaccurate sum up ...
Atom took forever, was tedious to follow, but did finally arrive with a clear definition and (more important) a clear set of unit tests.
RSS is a small zoo of slightly foggy beasts that are widely used and mostly work, except when they don’t - and that’s about as good as you can expect.
Posted by Preston L. Bannister at“People” commonly have used “RSS” both as referring to a whole bunch of things+ and as referring to one or other specific markup format (usually being RSS 2.0, at this point).
IMO, the power of RSS has always been around the former, not the latter--which is why “people” don’t care so much whether their RSS is 1 or 2 or Atom or whatever.
+ I like to call this the RSS Combo-Meal.
Posted by Jay Fienberg atSam Ruby on the RSS wars
Sam Ruby: “Early drafts of the new spec referred to “its predecessor”. This language was removed, but the version number was bumped. Quite frankly, both are acts of social violence.” The problem with this RSS war is less about...Excerpt from Randy Holloway Unfiltered 2.0 at
This may be an uninformed question, but...
Let’s say I was developing an application from scratch which had the ability to produce feeds. Let’s say that I could only pick one feed format. Why would I pick RSS over Atom (is the only reason that RSS may have wider adoption)?
It seems like RSS is a mess, and that the Atom spec clearly defines what type of data can go where in the feed. Or am I mis-understanding?
Posted by Elliot Metsger atI’m fumbling around for a style convention for how to talk about Really Simple Syndication without making people think I’m also talking about RDF Site Summary or Atom.
The only deployed specification that expands the RSS acronym out in that manner is RSS 2.0. In many cases (in particular in a description of non-Atom, non-RDF podcasting applications), describing it that way is both clear and precise.
Posted by Sam Ruby atSam Ruby: Rogers makes the case that all podcasters relying on multiple enclosures will be publishing RSS feeds that don’t work for what is potentially their largest audience, and Dave pleads for Rogers to “decide whether you’re...
Excerpt from Spoken at
Elliot: most of what you see by in this post by Daniel Berlinger and the ensuing discussion between Daniel and Phil captures my sentiments on this discussion.
The only thing I would add is that at this point, in early 2006, I would recommend that you stick with one of the big three: RSS 1.0, RSS 2.0, and Atom 1.0.
Posted by Sam Ruby atI’ll come right out with a stronger recommendation: pick RSS 1.x if your internal data model is RDF anyway; in all other cases, use Atom.
RSS 0.9x/2.0 has the widest deployment in terms of published feeds, but both other choices are deployed so widely that no consumer application can afford to ignore them, so there is no reason to pick RSS 0.9x/2.0 just because of mind share. RSS 0.9x/2.0 is only advisable if you are targeting specific consumers who will have known and unfixable problems with the other choices.
Posted by Aristotle Pagaltzis atSam Ruby on the RSS wars
Sam Ruby: “Early drafts of the new spec referred to “its predecessor”. This language was removed, but the version number was bumped. Quite frankly, both are acts of social violence.” The problem with this RSS war is less about...Excerpt from Randy Holloway Unfiltered 2.0 at
links for 2007-02-01
Sam Ruby: Version Numbers An interesting view on software versioning, and the problems that can occur when a new version comes out with a bumped version number. “Attempting to force differing approaches onto a numeric and [...]...Excerpt from Ross' PhD Blog at
I’m fumbling around for a style convention for how to talk about Really Simple Syndication without making people think I’m also talking about RDF Site Summary or Atom.
When I use “RSS”, I generally mean Really Simple Syndication only. The use of RSS in the media and blogs to describe Atom bugs me.
Posted by Rogers Cadenhead at