I stopped paying attention to the syndication wars
a couple of months ago. I barely have time to stay on top of all the
stuff I have to worry about as part of my day job let alone keeping
track of the pointlessness that is the Atom vs. RSS debate.
Unfortunately, every once in a while something happens that forces me
to pay attention because I'm also the project lead for RSS Bandit.
One cool thing about XML syndication formats like RSS and Atom is that
they are easily extensible. This means that anyone can come up with a
new extension to the RSS/Atom formats which adds a new feature but is
ignored by feed readers that don't understand the extension. Some of my
favorite extensions are slash:comments which provides a count of the number of comments in a feed and wfw:commentRss which provides the URL to the feed for the comments to a blog post in the feed. One of my work items for the next version of RSS Bandit
is to make it easier for people to 'watch' the comments for a blog post
they are interested in if it supports these extensions. That way I can
get get a notification everytime some comment thread I am interested in
gets new posts directly from my aggregator instead of using other tools
like CoComment.
A few days ago Sam Ruby posted an entry entitled Rogers Switches! where he mentioned that he now redirects all requests for his RSS feeds to his Atom feed. This meant that in RSS Bandit
I now no longer see the comment count for the blog posts in Sam's feed
nor can I view the comments to his posts directly within my aggregator.
Sam and I had the following exchange in his blog comments when I
discovered the ramifications of his change
I was trying to figure out if I’d introduced a bug in RSS Bandit to make your
comment count and inline comments disappear. Instead, it seems you have made
your feed less useful as part of the fallout of yet another iteration of the
eternal pissing match which is the XML syndication wars.
sigh
Posted by Dare Obasanjo at 20:25
I looked at the draft of the Feed
Thread Extension specification Sam linked to and it seems like a reinvention of the functionality provided by the slash:comments, wfw:commentRss and annotate:reference
extensions. Great, not only do we now have to deal with the an increase
in the number of competing XML syndication formats due to the Atom
process ...By the way, have you seen the Atom 0.3 vs. Atom 1.0 debate? I told you so... we now also have to deal with duplicates of all the popular RSS extensions as well? Give me a break!
That said, you can expect support for these new extensions in the next version of RSS Bandit.
At the end of the day, what matters is building useful software for our
users regardless of how many petty annoyances are thrown in our way on
the road there.