intertwingly

Rogers Cadenhead: My weblog’s Atom 1.0 feed is now online. As an experiment, I’m routing all RSS requests to this feed.  I’m curious about whether aggregators can handle that. The RSS 2.0 code’s still around so I can offer both, but I’d prefer to offer a feed in one format so I avoid the need to debug two.

I’m following Rogers' lead, and have done the same with my remaining feeds.

Donald Ferguson: Calvin “ Silent Cal” Coolidge was also from rural New England. A newspaper reporter was going to the White House for a state dinner. She bet her editor that she could get Silent Cal to say more than three words to her at dinner. At dinner, she charmingly told the situation to Silent Cal. His response. “You lose.” My hero.

I remember a meeting in Austin, TX a few years back in which there were perhaps 80 or so people in a long and narrow room.  Don positioned his chair sideways on the narrow edge nearest the door.  At one point, he had something to add.  As he began to speak, he was quickly interrupted with a request: “Could you speak up?”.  Don paused for a second.  His then responded with a “no”, whereupon he proceeded from the point where he had left off.

The “less code” and “simpler” memes are advancing from below.  And from above.  From the inside.  As well as from the outside.

P.S.

Anybody have any good recommendations for removing Tabasco stains?  ;-)

Tim Bray: Red Herring: Statelessness · Statelessness isn’t an architectural fundamental, it’s a useful engineering technique for making distributed systems scaleable. Lots of Web-style applications keep all sorts of client state on the server and they work just fine. Those ones probably won’t scale up to serve all of humanity across the Internet, or even a hundred thousand busy online shoppers, but there are lots of useful apps that don’t need that kind of scale

It is worth looking at protocols that predated HTTP, like FTP.  I agree that explicit sessions (via techniques like cookies or URI rewriting) are a part of the Internet as practiced today.  However, it is worth pointing out that the trend is away from implicit state and multi-layered protocols.

I also find it facinating that people square off on REST vs Web Services, when SMTP and BitTorrent are the real winners.

Mihai Parparita: While developing this sharing feature, it became clear that the ultimate origin of an item in a feed is very important (i.e. I may see it because I’m subscribed to your “web-dev” label, but really it’s from QuirksBlog). We joked about the need for a “Molecule” format that would specify the aggregation of multiple Atom feeds. We even began coding a (namespaced) origin element that would contain the title, id, homepage URL, etc. of the originating site for this item. Then, while re-reading RFC 4287 for another reason, we came across the source element in Atom, which does exactly what we had set out to (re)implement.

[Via Robert Sayre, who quite appropriately attributes this idea to long time Atom Contributor Bob Wyman].

John Cowan: We all (being reasonable persons and not fanatics) are trapped by Quine’s Paradox

Thanks Tim!

jonnay: All this jazz about HTTP error messages, methods beyond GET and POST, its all just good HTTP baby. It has very little to do with actual restfulness or not. All the HTTP conformance in the world wont mean a thing if your application stores client state on the server. You still won’t be RESTful.

In all, it looks like my optimism of nearly three and a half years ago was largely unwarranted.

...

James Holderness: Twenty contestants! Thirty-one tests! Spanning three hundred years and fourteen time zones! ... Sorry, I got a little over excited there. These are the results of my RSS date tests.

Sobering.

Dave Johnson: That’s pretty weird alright, but they’re on the right track. They’re using Atom elements to model RSS.

It looks like Microsoft is actually deploying code which utilizes the Simple List Extensions namespace.  Sort of.

It appears that the SLE spec was updated a week ago today.  Unfortunately, none of the elements or attribute inserted by FeedsManager.Normalize() are actually defined by the specification.

Requests:

• Update the example in the spec to be valid.
• Document the elements and attributes which were added.  Oh, and produce a valid feed.
• Document what <cf:sort element="description"/> would mean in a context where the feed you get is not necessarily the feed that was produced.

Robert Sayre: The most rewarding thing I’ve done this year and last was getting involved in the Mozilla project. It can be slow, bureaucratic, and irritating, but good stuff gets done in the end

My experience with Mozilla was abysmal.  Despite having a solid background in C/C++, and COM (albeit MS-COM), the existing class libraries were daunting and clearly had evolved over time; for example, there are a number of different String classes.

...

Koranteng Ofosu-Amaah: To recap, the REST elevator pitch is

• Identification Of Resources
• Manipulation Of Resources Through Representations
• Self-Descriptive Messages
• Hypermedia As The Engine Of Application State

Koranteng Ofosu-Amaah: The thing however is that these details do matter and they are best dealt with up front. The aggregate waste of programmer effort in pursuit of minutiae might keep the profession in business but it surely isn’t sustainable.

Excellent post. 

P.S.  here is the link to my description of the xsd:boolean issue.  In the first SOAPBuilders interoperability meeting, both the Microsoft and Apache implementations initially failed.

Dave Johnson: While we waited for Atom protocol to stabilize, things changed in the world of C# and Java feed APIs. Microsoft introduced the Windows RSS platform and a pre-release of the Windows Feeds API is available in the IE7 beta. And ROME has come along way too; now with Atom format 1.0 support and a growing list of extension modules. We decided that we just couldn’t publish a book on RSS and Atom without covering the Windows RSS platform and ROME in-depth.

Dave is already uncovering some “interesting” (read: difficult to explain) results with the Windows Feeds API.  Dropping the email address of the person in favor of the name seems particularly troublesome.

I wonder if Dave plans to look at the Google Reader platform?

Jonno Downes: I was curious to see how IE handled all the different HTTP status codes, so I put together some ruby scripts to test them

I’ve tried this with Firefox.

...

Tony Baer: You had, in effect, a barrier between the circulatory and nervous systems where interaction, and responsibility for it, was carefully proscribed.

Except for the proscribed/ prescribed gaffe, I like the analogy.

Joe Gregorio: The Atom Publishing Protocol Test Suite has been added to the subversion repository of the Feed Validator

Discussion should take place on the atom-protocol mailing list

An analysis of a week’s work of click-throughs on Feed Validator [help] links

...

David Heinemeier Hansson: A huge thanks to the team behind the Atompub specification. This document has been a massive eye opener to best practice use of HTTP in a RESTful fashion. I encourage everyone with an interest in web services to read it. It started an avalanche of ideas in my mind. This respond_to implementation is just one offspring of those ideas.

Nice to hear, but I’d like to point out a cautionary note about that one particular feature.

Don’t get me wrong, HTTP and REST are great stuff.  But just like everything else, there are a few pitfalls to watch out for.

My advice: some of these features can wait for Rails 1.2.

Meanwhile, it looks like DabbleDB has added the Atom API to its plans.

David Heinemeier Hansson: The greater the versatility, the higher the abstraction, the less useful for the specifics.

I’m old enough to remember when relational databases were controversial.  Some of the arguments brought forward at those times are very reminiscent of the ones being made today.  Meanwhile David’s The sprint of ideas before release are making me drool, particularly as I had an opportunity to discuss a few of them with David at ETech last week.

Diego Doval: The whole content store is now AtomAPI-accessible. Cool eh?

Bing!  Errr, um, ... Ning!

Yes, it is cool.  Way cool.  Welcome aboard.

Susan A. Kitchens: It’s crafty. Subtle. With a silent “b,” and is way beyond me. B that stands for Busy. Right here in River City.

It really bothers me when the Feed Validator can’t provide helpful advice.

...

Sometime, about two weeks ago, I started having problems with applications which involve VPNing into work, specifically with Sametime.  By issuing the following command, these problems seem to have gone away:

sudo ifconfig ath0 mtu 1415

I hate it when that happens.

SourceForge: The SourceForge.net Service Operations Group has completed the implementation of the Subversion service offering on SourceForge.net

Thanks go out to Joe Gregorio for spotting this and doing the heavy lifting (a few button presses, apparently) to migrate the FeedValidator from CVS to Subversion.

Note: I would point to Joe’s post on the feedvalidator-users mailing list, but due to a ML services issue, the web archives aren’t being updated at the moment.