Misinformation on namespaces
When I say "Prince" do you think of a pop idol of the 80's that flirted for a while with an unpronouncable symbol? Now when I say "Prince Charles" do you think of a person with somewhat flappy ears?
By the logic that Dave is applying to RSS, Dave would have you believe that they are the same individual. He claims that scripting news's rss feed (in which all the elements are in the http://backend.userland.com/rss2 namespace is as valid RSS as one in which the elements are in no namespace.
And then he talks about parsers which properly handle namespaces as if they are the ones that are broken.
I thererefore must change my opinon. Where I previously thought that RSS 2.0 suffered from a simple omission, now I must consider RSS 2.0 fundamentally busted.
Sorry, Dave.
Update: now that there is recognition that the spec is imperfect in regards to namespaces, my opinion goes back to this being a simple omission.
There are many more subjects that I am ignorant of than subjects that I am knowledgable of. I suspect the same is true for Dave and Dare too.
I respect Dave for putting it all out for all to see - the brilliance and the ignorance alike.
Posted by Sam Ruby at
No one knows everything and people often make mistakes.
However, it is one thing to not be a domain expert in a particular field making mistakes and another to make seemingly authoritative pronouncements without research or full knowledge of the subject matter.
Dave is widely read and is somewhat of a technology pundit. He shouldn't be making unfounded statements without careful consideration.
Bah, I'm probably going to blog this after all.
Posted by Dare Obasanjo at
This is the internet. Everone is a pundit. How much "authority" you assign to a particular opinion you find here is your choice.
Posted by Sam Ruby at
Blogged: http://www.kuro5hin.org/story/2002/9/28/154044/508
but you probably already knew that. :)
Posted by Dare Obasanjo at
Hey guys, how about rolling up your sleeves and doing some honest work.
There's a thread over on Ben Hammersley's weblog that has reached an impasse.
As soon as we have the right answer and consensus we can move forward.
Posted by Dave Winer at
Dave Winer is within his rights to decide not to use namespaces in whatever spec he comes up with for syndicating Radio content.
However spreading FUD about namespace usage in specifications smacks of ignorance. Until RSS, I had never seen a deployed XML vocabulary that didn't use namespaces except for XML config files.
I considered writing more about this in my diary but I seem to remember being warned about Winer's vindictive nature and sensitivity to critisicm so I'll leave my comments as this.
Posted by Dare Obasanjo at