January 23, 2003
@ 03:58 PM
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You Ain't Gotta Love Me But You Better Learn To Respect Me
Ignoring Standards for Competitive Advantage

Mark Pilgrim has both an article on XML.com and a blog entry about techniques for RSS aggregators to use in parsing invalid XML in RSS feeds. This article bothers me for reasons I mentioned in a comment on XML.com.

Mark mentions that RSS feeds of various popular news sources often are invalid XML which prevents them from being processed by news aggregators that use standards compliant XML parsers. He points out that RSS aggregators that process such ill-formed feeds would possess a "competitive advantage" and would be more beneficial to end users than those that were standards compliant.

The problem I have with this approach is that it poisons the XML well. XML is about interop and availability of off-the-shelf tools that can process it. Without that we have a rather verbose markup langauge with a number of arcane rules and absurd limitations. Consider that processing ill-formed XML becomes mainstream within the RSS aggregator community which means more RSS feeds will be able to get away with producing invalid XML in their feeds. However this won't be limited to the RSS community (if it was I wouldn't care). People keep finding new ways to repurpose RSS such as for weblog archives or as a reinvention of Push technologies that were popular during the DotCom heyday. If alternate uses of RSS grow then the pressure on other XML technologies that would be used to process RSS (e.g. XML databases for blog archives, XSLT engines for presentation, XML query engines for retrieving information from feeds) will also be pressured to accept this Tag Soup which would bring users and implementers of XML technologies to the same ghetto that HTML users and developers currently live. Of course, some of us like the hood which is why we end up with essay's like What is Tag Soup?

At the point of writing this Mark points out a common issue some MSXML users face in an attempt to bolster his point which in fact shows why "user friendliness" is not all it's cracked up to be

PS: I noticed Mark has gotten rid of his "Further Reading" links which I always thought were rather useful in seeing what others were saying about the same topic. Well, I guess I just have to use Technorati.

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Dave Winer on Single Sign On

Dave Winer is a bundle of contradictions which is nice since most interesting people are. On the one hand he endorses proprietary blog browsers instead of using standard technologies like HTML & XSLT to browse RSS feeds to get away from the "grip of the Web browser monopolist" but on the other suggests things like the You Know Me Button which reads like a spec for a project that screams Microsoft Passport if I've ever read one.

Even without the similarity to a Passport based solution it is interesting to see someone who'd rather avoid standard technologies that are endorsed by most of the software industry with lots of support from the Open Source community simply to avoid a "monopolist" only to suggest a technology that would require a monopoly to be truly useful.

A bundle of contradictions indeed.

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Features vs. Functionality

Andy and I have been having conversations recently about the problem with focusing on feature requests from your users instead of focusing on the functionality these features would enable. At times one gets so wrapped up in technology that we forget that the purpose of software is to solve people's problems and not technology for technology's sake.

Instead of blindly implementing feature X or feature Y because a number of users request it, it often makes more sense to find out why they need feature X or feature Y. This often leads to providing a better solution for your users by understanding their problems. Also focusing on functionality instead of features and feature requests enables one to better notice flawed approaches in the way your technology or application is being used by your customers/users.

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Disclaimer: The above comments do not represent the thoughts, intentions, plans or strategies of my employer. They are solely my opinion.
 

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