Comments on: RSS Board: Do As We Say, Not As We Do

By: Rogers Cadenhead

Rogers Cadenhead — Fri, 26 Oct 2007 17:17:24 +0000

To follow up, WordPress and WordPress MU have added support for atom:link:

http://www.rssboard.org/news/179

By: Mark Woodman

Mark Woodman — Wed, 24 Oct 2007 14:16:38 +0000

James,

I recognize that all sorts of nerves have been touched on this topic on the public forum, but if you’ll carefully read this post, you’ll find neither criticism of RSS nor of the profile.

There is no “assertion that [RSS] isn’t useful or easy to follow” whatsoever.

The scope of my assertion is that this “is a lost opportunity to show that the profile is easy to follow.”

By: James Holderness

James Holderness — Wed, 24 Oct 2007 12:30:32 +0000

As has been mentioned, the software used to produce the feed isn’t always under the control of the blog author. Just because the tools developers aren’t yet following the recommendations, doesn’t mean they’re bad recommendations.

As for waiting a month or two, the Atom syndication format, by comparison, has been an official RFC since December 2005. And yet the co-chair of the Atom WG still has invalid feeds over a year and half later: http://tinyurl.com/2k3uuk

Those bugs have been around so long that I’ve long since shipped updated software with patches to work around the problem rather than wait for the feed to be fixed.

Based on the above evidence, would you make a similar assertion that the Atom syndication format isn’t useful or easy to follow?

By: Randy Charles Morin

Randy Charles Morin — Tue, 23 Oct 2007 23:02:34 +0000

BTW, the reason my feed doesn’t validate is a bug in FeedBurner.

By: Rogers Cadenhead

Rogers Cadenhead — Tue, 23 Oct 2007 21:13:06 +0000

Giving good advice is always easier than following it. You do have a good point, and I will pester the board members to practice what we preach.

In some cases, we’re already fixing this by working with the creators of the publishing software they use.

By: Mark Woodman

Mark Woodman — Tue, 23 Oct 2007 20:16:16 +0000

Randy, you get a free pass if you’re managing 100K feeds Too bad you don’t have a common mechanism to ensure QC on all of them, though.

Still, this is an opportunity lost for the Board to show the profile is useful. If they don’t even bother to follow it, why should anybody else?

Perhaps the best evidence is to wait a month or two and see if the adoption rate among board members has improved.

By: Randy Charles Morin

Randy Charles Morin — Tue, 23 Oct 2007 20:10:02 +0000

I manage approximately 100k feeds. I’m sure they generate lots of errors and warnings. I’d have to hire an army to make sure they always validate. That doesn’t say anything about the profile.