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Yes, you were (in hindsight) right in standing fast against correcting these problems in RSS 2.0, no-one would have been satisfied with the result. Atom starte

Yes, you were (in hindsight) right in standing fast against correcting these problems in RSS 2.0, no-one would have been satisfied with the result. Atom started around the discussion of "An Anatomy of a Well Formed Blog Entry", not any specification text. We didn't start with a copy of RSS 2.0 and XML/RPC and rewrite bits and pieces until it became Atom. The Atom community went further back than that, we examined how RSS was being used at that time, and considered how it might be used in the future, and defined several use cases or problem statements, and built up a specification format based on that. As far as I remember, we never started with the RSS 2.0 spec text. The Atom Syndication fomat (the XML part) and the Atom Publishing format (the REST part) started as one and then later ran separately in parallel. Both fed requirements into each other. In RSS2.0 the item element was always inside a channel, so there was always a parent context of it's meaning beyond it's namespaced definition. With Atom publishing format, we have blog entries as stand alone documents outside of a feed (so they can be created, retrieved, and updated as a single document). In that context, a top-level element name of entry is an improvement over item. And it was important to us to use the same vocabulary across both the syndication and publishing formats so the element became entry on both. Atom started from a clean slate, as you point out, there was going to be no way of fixing those problems with the RSS2.0 specification without significantly breaking existing implementations and backwards compatibility, and if somehow these were avoided, the RSS2.0 specification would probably have ended up in an absolute mess.

davewiner 16y ago
So there's an inconsistency betw your post and this comment. Maybe you'd like to review your post and see which parts you really believe and which parts are just hyperbole. Seems like a good time to figure out what actually happened there, as opposed to just re-reciting the same tired myths yet again. That's what I liked about the comment on Stack Overflow. He learned something from the way things turned out. This comment also shows that you've learned something, but your post is the same old same old.

davewiner 16y ago

So there's an inconsistency betw your post and this comment. Maybe you'd like to review your post and see which parts you really believe and which parts are just hyperbole. Seems like a good time to figure out what actually happened there, as opposed to just re-reciting the same tired myths yet again. That's what I liked about the comment on Stack Overflow. He learned something from the way things turned out. This comment also shows that you've learned something, but your post is the same old same old.