Discontinuities
This is in response to Dave's essay on Discontinuities.
Discontinuities include taking limits that people and tools rely on and removing them. Discontinuities likewise include taking required elements and making them optional. Discontinuities include allowing (or at least tolerating) people adding new elements and then taking this back this right for specific elements by introducing them into the core. Each of the above changes can break tools, and therefore can force upgrades upon users.
I dare say that RSS would not be the success it is today without these discontinuities. In particular, making title optional was a bold step that broke a number of assumptions that tools were making but made available a large number of feeds.
So, what does it take to nudge this spec along towards being rock solid? Jon Udell has some ideas at the bottom of this blog entry.
Namespace undefined
I disagree. To help illustrate the point, I've made a change to the namespace in my rss2 feed. Is it valid according to the specification? I don't know. If so, it would be very difficult to write an XSLT based aggregator which could handle the pot...... [more]Trackback from Sam Ruby at
Dave Winer seems to want the two main camps to unite under the RSS 2.0 banner. Previous discontinuities aside, there will be "pain and opportunities for breakage" even if it is perfectly compatible with Userland's flavors of RSS 0.9x because the same compatibility with RSS 2.0 will not be true for RSS 1.0.
Posted by Bruce Loebrich at