TheFeature :: The Battle For Market Share sony up, samsung up, motorola up my prediction is that motorola and nokia (unless they do something dramatic) will be much diminished in 10 years and we’ll be left with sony, microsoft,…

However, none of them are RDF based except 1.0, and 1.0 just. plain. sucked. It was 5 years old, and people were strongly dissuaded from using it because of the fact that it pretty much sucked.

This format isn’t an attempt to draw any new “customers” to the RDF world, really. It’s just a replacement for people who care primarily about the RDF aspect of their feeds, and not about aggregation. It’s an evolution of the 1.0 release to fix bugs that have been brought up over the 5 years that RSS 1.0 has been in place, and is designed to slowly replace 1.0.

1.1 is incompatible with 1.0, a decision we made with reluctance. Unfortunately, changing anything, right down to the namespace URI, causes parsers to not accept it as the same anymore. However, the path we went down means that most tools have only minor changes to support RSS 1.1: We’ve already got 4 aggregators who have implemented support (and had within an hour or two yesterday), which is, in my opinion, a testament to the fact that it is a relatively easy to implement change.

We wanted to improve the broken aspects of a broken syndication format. Unfortunately, we couldn’t do that without messing with some people. We’ve done our best to make it easy to update, and also done our best to make it clear that we’re not in the Syndication war: if any “fight” is going on, it’s far from our sphere, and outside our political reach. I just want something that doesn’t suck, and if nobody else uses it, then they don’t, and I really don’t care.

Now, even though I don’t speak RDF, I’m fairly sure that your new format will be technically better than RSS 1.0. But the technicalities involved really aren’t all that relevant, I don’t think. The vast majority of feeds and feed readers that I’ve seen don’t bother with many of the things that RSS can do. In most cases, the swathes of possible metadata just isn’t relevant.

I know that you’re all about the metadata, but for most people, both creating and reading feeds, they just don’t care. All they want is something that will get the things they want to read quickly and easily from point A to point B.

And all I want is a world where there aren’t a million and one competing syndication formats, and people aren’t constantly expecting the Next Big Thing (which is actually not at all big) to be supported. The problem (with the world of web syndication in general, not with RSS 1.1) is that it’s far too full of politics and egotism, and is sufficiently anarchic that it isn’t likely to stabilise any time soon.