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> Atom vs RSS is a great example of how technical correctness is trumped by social factors Or perhaps having at six year head start (RSS 0.90, 1999; Atom, 2005

> Atom vs RSS is a great example of how technical correctness is trumped by social factors Or perhaps having at six year head start (RSS 0.90, 1999; Atom, 2005) and having it compound. This includes podcasting, as the term was coined in 2004, but which was happening even before that (and before Atom was finalized): * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Podcast#Etymology https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Podcast#Etymology First mover advantage, leading to network effects, can be a thing.

acdha 3y ago
I’d also add Google dropping reader and trying to force open web content into various proprietary schemes. Atom’s many improvements over RSS didn’t matter as much when the oxygen was getting sucked out of the room and few people were investing more time in feeds.
westurner 3y ago
RSS > RSS compared with Atom https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RSS#RSS_compared_with_Atom https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RSS#RSS_compared_with_Atom CDATA > CDATA in XML: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/CDATA#CDATA_sections_in_XML https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/CDATA#CDATA_sections_in_XML IIRC RSS was not originally an XML document, so CDATA tags (to prevent XSS) didn't work; and the issue remains with content syndication: feed elements should somehow HTML escape their content to prevent XSS (arbitrary JS on a different Origin) XSS: Cross-site Scripting: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cross-site_scripting https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cross-site_scripting Same-origin policy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Same-origin_policy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Same-origin_policy https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/Security/Same-origin_policy https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/Security/Same-o... Content Security Policy (CSP) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Content_Security_Policy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Content_Security_Policy https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTTP/CSP https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTTP/CSP CSRF: Cross-site request forgery: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cross-site_request_forgery https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cross-site_request_forgery JSONP > CSRF: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JSONP#Cross-site_request_forgery https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JSONP#Cross-site_request_forge... The whole internet was broken, and RSS helped us realize it: the one-way, one-time syndication advantage. These days it's all about https://schema.org/CreativeWork https://schema.org/CreativeWork JSON-LD instead of RDFa, which you can try to sanitize with Mozilla/bleach like arbitrary HTML in comments on the page.
- CharlesW 3y ago
  > IIRC RSS was not originally an XML document… AFAIK RDF Site Summary (the original meaning of "RSS") used XML from the start¹. You may be thinking of spiritual predecessors like the Apple-developed MCF². ¹ https://www.rssboard.org/rss-0-9-0 https://www.rssboard.org/rss-0-9-0 ² https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_web_syndication_technology https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_web_syndication_tec...
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  - PaulHoule 3y ago
    It really amused me that people think "RDF never caught on" when it is the basis of so many major standards such as RSS, Adobe's XMP metadata, and, I just found out, ActivityPub. I was working on a standards committee for years and made the discovery that you can turn most XML Schema Definitions into an OWL ontologies and thus automatically transform conforming XML documents into RDF documents. (People had attempted this before but all the systems I saw were lossy or didn't make valid and decidable ontologies.) For better and worse my write up[ is about to become one of those ISO standard documents that costs 166 swiss franc but it looks like I'll get the opportunity to apply this method to a major financial standard and release the software that does it as open source. I'd contrast that to the truly awful RDF/XML spec where people never really understood where the XML stopped and the RDF began. It turned a lot of people off to RDF and people never got to see how easy it is with Turtle. Unfortunately JSON-LD hasn't got the love it deserves because it fixes most of the major problems with JSONs except for the lack of /* comments */ and you can frequently add a touch of JSON-LD to a JSON document you find on the street and get instant RDF you can query w/ SPARQL. It looks like the W3C has started the process of a SPARQL 1.2 spec which could be a very good thing if it catches up with what is possible w/ document database query languages like N1QL, AQL and such.
    - gsnedders 3y ago
      > It really amused me that people think "RDF never caught on" when it is the basis of so many major standards such as RSS, Adobe's XMP metadata, and, I just found out, ActivityPub. What does it mean to have caught on or not, though? How many RSS, XMP, ActivityPub implementations are actually considering things as triples and not just considering parent-child relationships within the XML tree?
samstave 3y ago
So is this as BetaMax was to VHS? EDIT on 'podcast': I was literally wondering this AM where 'pod'cast came from - thank you for the link (I love in-sects, which is why I love Etymology!)

acdha 3y ago

I’d also add Google dropping reader and trying to force open web content into various proprietary schemes. Atom’s many improvements over RSS didn’t matter as much when the oxygen was getting sucked out of the room and few people were investing more time in feeds.

westurner 3y ago

RSS > RSS compared with Atom https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RSS#RSS_compared_with_Atom https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RSS#RSS_compared_with_Atom CDATA > CDATA in XML: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/CDATA#CDATA_sections_in_XML https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/CDATA#CDATA_sections_in_XML IIRC RSS was not originally an XML document, so CDATA tags (to prevent XSS) didn't work; and the issue remains with content syndication: feed elements should somehow HTML escape their content to prevent XSS (arbitrary JS on a different Origin) XSS: Cross-site Scripting: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cross-site_scripting https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cross-site_scripting Same-origin policy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Same-origin_policy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Same-origin_policy https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/Security/Same-origin_policy https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/Security/Same-o... Content Security Policy (CSP) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Content_Security_Policy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Content_Security_Policy https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTTP/CSP https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTTP/CSP CSRF: Cross-site request forgery: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cross-site_request_forgery https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cross-site_request_forgery JSONP > CSRF: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JSONP#Cross-site_request_forgery https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JSONP#Cross-site_request_forge... The whole internet was broken, and RSS helped us realize it: the one-way, one-time syndication advantage. These days it's all about https://schema.org/CreativeWork https://schema.org/CreativeWork JSON-LD instead of RDFa, which you can try to sanitize with Mozilla/bleach like arbitrary HTML in comments on the page.

CharlesW 3y ago
> IIRC RSS was not originally an XML document… AFAIK RDF Site Summary (the original meaning of "RSS") used XML from the start¹. You may be thinking of spiritual predecessors like the Apple-developed MCF². ¹ https://www.rssboard.org/rss-0-9-0 https://www.rssboard.org/rss-0-9-0 ² https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_web_syndication_technology https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_web_syndication_tec...
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- PaulHoule 3y ago
  It really amused me that people think "RDF never caught on" when it is the basis of so many major standards such as RSS, Adobe's XMP metadata, and, I just found out, ActivityPub. I was working on a standards committee for years and made the discovery that you can turn most XML Schema Definitions into an OWL ontologies and thus automatically transform conforming XML documents into RDF documents. (People had attempted this before but all the systems I saw were lossy or didn't make valid and decidable ontologies.) For better and worse my write up[ is about to become one of those ISO standard documents that costs 166 swiss franc but it looks like I'll get the opportunity to apply this method to a major financial standard and release the software that does it as open source. I'd contrast that to the truly awful RDF/XML spec where people never really understood where the XML stopped and the RDF began. It turned a lot of people off to RDF and people never got to see how easy it is with Turtle. Unfortunately JSON-LD hasn't got the love it deserves because it fixes most of the major problems with JSONs except for the lack of /* comments */ and you can frequently add a touch of JSON-LD to a JSON document you find on the street and get instant RDF you can query w/ SPARQL. It looks like the W3C has started the process of a SPARQL 1.2 spec which could be a very good thing if it catches up with what is possible w/ document database query languages like N1QL, AQL and such.
  - gsnedders 3y ago
    > It really amused me that people think "RDF never caught on" when it is the basis of so many major standards such as RSS, Adobe's XMP metadata, and, I just found out, ActivityPub. What does it mean to have caught on or not, though? How many RSS, XMP, ActivityPub implementations are actually considering things as triples and not just considering parent-child relationships within the XML tree?

samstave 3y ago

So is this as BetaMax was to VHS? EDIT on 'podcast': I was literally wondering this AM where 'pod'cast came from - thank you for the link (I love in-sects, which is why I love Etymology!)