On Funky RSS and Arrogance

The technically-inclined portion of the blogosphere has been in upheaval for (I think) a couple weeks now over the alleged "funkiness" of Movable Type's implementation of RSS. Actually, it appears to have begun with this post from Dave Winer, on June 8. I didn't pick up on any of this until June 21, when Mark Pilgrim addressed the issue on his blog. Thanks to his warning ("If you don't know what I'm talking about, trust me, you don't want to know. Stop reading right now before you get sucked into this world"), I sort of glossed over it and put it out of my mind.

In the past few days, though, it's kept showing up in more and more of the blogs on my blogroll, and I've actively tried to figure out what the fuck is going on. It's escalated to the death notice of RSS and a movement to design its ostensible successor, tentatively called Echo (and it's already got some very nifty logos).

I tried for the past several days to decide what side I am on, and while there are some really brilliant minds working on the Echo (or is it ((Echo))?) project, and some truly great things could come out of it, I kept coming back to the idea that all of the differences are political. There are no technical reasons (that I have seen) that prevent eveything from being worked out without the hassle of defining a new format and winning widespread acceptance of it.

Brad Choate nearly won me over with his attempt at a "non-funky" MT RSS template yesterday, and Mark's response almost finished the job. But I stumbled back to Scripting News today to read the following:

[A]nyone who uses weblogs and aggregators should be angry as hell when developers try to rip up the pavement, break everything and start over, just when it's all working so well. The weblog story isn't about technology anymore, it's about writers and readers.

Which is funny, because, according to Dave, everything is not working well, and he has been making it about technology for the past several weeks. Though I like RSS, and I believe abandoning it could set things back a bit, it's time to make a clean break with the past. We need a well-documented, community-designed, free and open standard. Count me in.

June 26, 2003 - 02:48 PM