Sifry’s Alerts

With the announcement yesterday of the href="http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/tech/announceRss2">assignment
of the RSS 2.0
specification to Harvard
University, along with a href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/1.0/">Creative Commons
license and a new 3 person steering committee, RSS 2.0 has become
more firmly cemented as an infrastructural element in the web
publishing world.  This is a good thing.  It will help wary
organizations to feel more comfortable using a syndication standard
with the assurances that it is not going to be changed on a whim or
hijacked by someone with a hidden agenda.  RSS 2.0 isn’t perfect,
and that’s one of its best qualities.  It was designed with a “ href="http://www.jwz.org/doc/worse-is-better.html">worse is better”
mentality, what I like to call POGE – the href="http://doc.weblogs.com/2003/04/19#theSimpleCaseForXmpp">Principle
of Good Enough.  That means it is simple, easy to understand
and to code.  It means that it doesn’t have a lot of bells and
whistles, and it isn’t a format for all things or all purposes. 
It has a href="http://diveintomark.org/archives/2002/09/06/history_of_the_rss_fork.html">history,
which means it has some bumps and warts, but IMHO, it does a pretty
good job of doing what it sets out to do: Be a format for the
syndication of published content. 

This is not a knock on href="http://www.intertwingly.net/wiki/pie/FrontPage">other efforts
that attempt to achieve other goals.  My perspective is to use the
best tool for the job at hand, and it is OK for different people to
have different opinions on what that is.

Kudos to Dave Winer, the folks
at Berkman, and the href="http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/tech/advisoryBoard">Advisory Board
for taking this positive step.

Related posts:

1. Comments on the RSS Controversy
2. New Technorati Infrastructure beta test!
3. Easy News Topics

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