Adam Bosworth has posted his ISCOC04 talk on his weblog. The post is interesting although I disagreed with various bits and pieces of it. Below are some comments in response to various parts of his talk

On the one hand we have RSS 2.0 or Atom. The documents that are based on these formats are growing like a bay weed. Nobody really cares which one is used because they are largely interoperable. Both are essentially lists of links to content with interesting associated metadata. Both enable a model for capturing reputation, filtering, stand-off annotation, and so on. There was an abortive attempt to impose a rich abstract analytic formality on this community under the aegis of RDF and RSS 1.0. It failed. It failed because it was really too abstract, too formal, and altogether too hard to be useful to the shock troops just trying to get the job done. Instead RSS 2.0 and Atom have prevailed and are used these days to put together talk shows and play lists (podcasting) photo albums (Flickr), schedules for events, lists of interesting content, news, shopping specials, and so on. There is a killer app for it, Blogreaders/RSS Viewers.

Although it is clear that RSS 2.0 seems to be edging out RSS 1.0, I wouldn't say it has failed per se. I definitely wouldn't say it failed for being too formal and abstract. In my opinion it failed because it was more complex with no tangible benefit. This is the same reason XHTML has failed when compared to HTML. This doesn't necessarily mean that more rigid sysems will fail to take hold when compared to less rigid systems, if so we'd never have seen the shift from C to C++ then from C++ to C#/Java.

Secondly, it is clear It seems Adam is throwing out some Google spin here by trying to lump the nascent and currently in-progress Atom format in the same group as RSS 2.0. In fact, if not for Google jumping on the Atom bandwagon it would even be more of an intellectual curiousity than RSS 1.0.    

As I said earlier, I remember listening many years ago to someone saying contemptuously that HTML would never succeed because it was so primitive. It succeeded, of course, precisely because it was so primitive. Today, I listen to the same people at the same companies say that XML over HTTP can never succeed because it is so primitive. Only with SOAP and SCHEMA and so on can it succeed. But the real magic in XML is that it is self-describing. The RDF guys never got this because they were looking for something that has never been delivered, namely universal truth. Saying that XML couldn't succeed because the semantics weren't known is like saying that Relational Databases couldn't succeed because the semantics weren't known or Text Search cannot succeed for the same reason. But there is a germ of truth in this assertion. It was and is hard to tell anything about the XML in a universal way. It is why Infopath has had to jump through so many contorted hoops to enable easy editing. By contrast, the RSS model is easy with an almost arbitrary set of known properties for an item in a list such as the name, the description, the link, and mime type and size if it is an enclosure. As with HTML, there is just enough information to be useful. Like HTML, it can be extended when necessary, but most people do it judiciously. Thus Blogreaders and aggregators can effortlessly show the content and understanding that the value is in the information. Oh yes, there is one other difference between Blogreaders and Infopath. They are free. They understand that the value is in the content, not the device.

Lots of stuff to agree with and disagree with here. Taking it from the top, the assertion that XML is self-describing is a myth. XML is a way to attach labels to islands of data, the labels are only useful if you know what they mean. Where XML shines is that one can start with a limited set of labels that are widely understood (title, link, description) but attach data with labels that are less likely to be understood (wfw:commentRss, annotate:reference, ent:cloud) without harming the system. My recent talk at XML 2004, Designing XML Formats: Versioning vs. Extensibility, was on the importance of this and how to bring this flexibility to the straitjacketed world of XML Schema.

I also wonder who the people are that claim that XML over HTTP will never succeed. XML over HTTP already has in a lot of settings. However I'd question that it is all you need. The richer the set of interactions allowed by the web site the more an API is needed. Google, Amazon and eBay all have XML-based APIs. Every major blogging tool has an XML-based API even though those same tools are using vanilla XML over HTTP for serving RSS feeds. XML over HTTP can succeed in a lot of settings but as the richness of the interaction between client and server grows so also does the need for a more powerful infrastructure.

The issue is knowing how to pick right tool for the job. You don't need the complexity of the entire WS-* stack to build a working system. I know a number of people at Microsoft realize that this message needs to get out more which is why you've begun to see things like Don Box's WS-Why Talk and the WS Kernel.

What has been new is information overload. Email long ago became a curse. Blogreaders only exacerbate the problem. I can't even imagine the video or audio equivalent because it will be so much harder to filter through. What will be new is people coming together to rate, to review, to discuss, to analyze, and to provide 100,000 Zagat's, models of trust for information, for goods, and for services. Who gives the best buzz cut in Flushing' We see it already in eBay. We see it in the importance of the number of deals and the ratings for people selling used books on Amazon. As I said in my blog, My mother never complains that she needs a better client for Amazon. Instead, her interest is in better community tools, better book lists, easier ways to see the book lists, more trust in the reviewers, librarian discussions since she is a librarian, and so on.
This is what will be new. In fact it already is. You want to see the future. Don't look at Longhorn. Look at Slashdot. 500,000 nerds coming together everyday just to manage information overload. Look at BlogLines. What will be the big enabler' Will it be Attention.XML as Steve Gillmor and Dave Sifry hope' Or something else less formal and more organic' It doesn't matter. The currency of reputation and judgment is the answer to the tragedy of the commons and it will find a way. This is where the action will be. Learning Avalon or Swing isn't going to matter. Machine learning and inference and data mining will. For the first time since computers came along, AI is the mainstream.

I tend to agree with most of this although I'm unsure why he feels the need to knock Longhorn and Java. What he seems to be overlooking is that part of the information overload problem is the prevalance of poor data visualization and user interface metaphors for dealing with significant amounts of data. I know believe that one of the biggest mistakes I made in the initial design of RSS Bandit was modelling it after mail readers like Outlook even though I knew lots of people who had difficulty managing the flood of email they get using them. This is why the next version of RSS Bandit will borrow a leaf from FeedDemon along with some other tricks I have up my sleeve.

A lot of what I do in RSS Bandit is made easy due to the fact that it's built on the .NET Framework and not C++/MFC so I wouldn't be as quick to knock next generation GUI frameworks as Adam is. Of course, now that he works for a Web company the browser is king.


 

Categories: Syndication Technology | XML

November 19, 2004
@ 08:33 AM

My XML in the .NET Framework: Past, Present & Future talk went well yesterday. The room was full and people seemed to like what they heard. The audience was most enamored with the upcoming System.Xml.Schema.XmlSchemaInference class that provides the ability to generate schemas from sample documents and the new XSLT debugger.

It was nice having people walk up to me yesterday to tell me how much they liked my talk from the previous day. There were even a couple of RSS Bandit users who walked up to me to tell me how much they liked it. This was definitely my best XML conference experience.

Arpan did comment on the irony of me giving more talks about XML after leaving the XML team at Microsoft than when I was on the team. :)


 

Categories: Ramblings | XML

November 18, 2004
@ 07:12 PM

My XML 2004 talk, Designing XML Formats: Versioning vs. Extensibility, went over well yesterday. Lots of interesting questions were asked during the Q&A session for my talk and the following talk by Dave Orchard, Achieving Distributed Extensibility and Versioning.

One issue that came up during the discussions after our talk was the cost/benefit of using a mustUnderstand construct in an XML format similar to the SOAP mustUnderstand attribute. The primary benefit of the having such a construct is that it enables third parties to create mandatory extensions to an XML format. However there a number of costs to having such a construct

  1. Entire Element or Document Must Be Read: A processor that just wants to extract a subset of the data in the document still has to parse the entire document and see if there are any mustUnderstand constructs before it can process the document. This increases the cost of processing instances of the format.
  2. Ambiguity as to what is Meant by 'Understand': The concept of what it means to "understand" an XML vocabulary is context specific. For example, should a stylesheet that pretty prints an XML document fail because the format contains a mustUnderstand construct that is not explicitly handled by the stylesheet? A mustUnderstand construct is particularly limiting since it forces all consumers to fail even though there may be some consumers that can still use the format even if they don't explicitly understand certain elements or attribute in the document.
  3. Causes Confusion for Intermediaries: In certain cases, a format may be processed by an intermediary on the way to the client from the server. For example, HTTP requests often pass through proxy servers and there are also web-based aggregators of RSS/Atom feeds such as Feedster & PubSub which can then be subscribed to by other aggregators. In such cases, it is ambiguous whether intermediaries are expected to fail if a construct which isn't explicitly handled is labelled as mustUnderstand or whether they are expected to pass it on with that label to third party aggregators. In fact certain formats thus have separate mustUnderstand constructs for hop-to-hop versus end-to-end transmission.

From my perspective, the cost of having a mustUnderstand construct is often not worth the benefits provided. This wasn't explicitly in my talk but is a conclusion I came to recently which I expanded upon during the Q&A session.


 

Categories: XML

November 17, 2004
@ 01:13 PM

Recently I've been having the same problems with my iPod that Omar Shahine described in his post PlaysForSure

So, here is the landscape today. I have an iPod, it's beautiful, small, light and has a great out of box experience. I plug it into a Mac or a PC with iTunes installed and the rest is mostly magic. iTunes can automatically communicate with the iPod, sync all my music over firewire and charge the device at the same time. However, my iPod seems to think that after hours and hours of charging the battery is half full. As you use it though the battery meter increases before it decreases. If I leave the iPod sitting for a few days, via osmosis or some process, the battery drains. So most of the time when I want to use it, I can't cause it's dead. It also won't even last for a complete transatlantic flight.

I love my iPod but this is beginning to get old. It looks like it's time I replaced my battery, at least the price seems to be only about $30.00. Anyone out there have any experience with replacing their iPod battery?


 

Categories: Ramblings

November 16, 2004
@ 06:56 AM

I picked up a copy of Halo 2 from the Microsoft company store last week. It's definitely a great game but nothing revolutionary. It's the original Halo with more guns where you also get to play as one of the Covenant in campaign mode. The graphics are excellent, the sound is great and the gameplay is about the same. The outdoor levels where you ride around on a Warthog are just as cool as before and the treks around the mazes in the indoor levels also tend to get just as repetitive as before. The game truly shines in multiplayer mode and may be the incentive for me finally setting up XBox Live at home given that the kit has been sitting on my cofee table for about half a year.

I also picked up the AudioVox SMT 5600 last week. I've wanted a Windows Smartphone for months because I'd gotten to the point where having access to my Outlook inbox and calendar on the go was becoming more and more necessary. I picked the AudioVox 5600 based on some favorable comments from Robert Scoble which were echoed by someone from the MSN Messenger team during an impromptu cross team meeting. I totally love the phone and take back all the snide comments I used to make about folks like Russell Beattie who are always singing the praises of mobile phones that do more than make voice calls. I even used the camera on my phone today while sight seeing in Washington, DC. However, unlike Scoble and my new boss I don't see this phone or anything like it replacing my iPod anytime soon.

That's two Microsoft-related personal purchases that I'd heartily recommend to a friend. Excellent.


 

I checked in the basic infrastructure for adding support for deleting items in RSS Bandit this weekend and Torsten made a first pass at the UI. The screenshot below shows the feature as currently checked into CVS. The main pieces left are to ensure that this works smoothly with synchronization so that if I sync from home my work instance of RSS Bandit knows which items I deleted while at home.


 

Categories: RSS Bandit

This morning I tried out the MSN Search Beta and was suitably impressed. There were some availability issues last night which led some to proclaim the new MSN search: an unmitigated disaster. However today things are running fine.

I tried the following queries on both services and got some interesting results

  1. "dare obasanjo"

    Google Result Description
    http://www.25hoursaday.com/weblog/ My current personal weblog
    http://www.kuro5hin.org/user/Carnage4Life/diary My former personal weblog
    http://blogs.msdn.com/dareobasanjo My current work-related weblog
    http://www.xml.com/pub/au/142 My author page on XML.com
    http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/en-us/dnexxml/html/xml01202003.asp The most popular article from my Extreme XML column on MSDN

    MSN Search (beta) Result Description
    http://www.25hoursaday.com/weblog/ My current personal weblog
    http://blogs.msdn.com/dareobasanjo My current work-related weblog
    http://www.xml.com/pub/au/142 My author page on XML.com
    http://www.rssbandit.org/ow.asp?DareObasanjo My personal page on the RSS Bandit wiki
    http://www.afriguru.com/2004/dare-obasanjo.html A blog post that refers to me as a Nigerian XML expert

  2. "rss bandit" OR rssbandit

    Google Result Description
    http://www.rssbandit.org/ The RSS Bandit webpage
    http://www.gotdotnet.com/Community/Workspaces/Workspace.aspx?id=cb8d3173-9f65-46fe-bf17-122e3703bb00 The former RSS Bandit project page on GotDotNet Workspaces
    http://sourceforge.net/projects/rssbandit The current RSS Bandit project page on SourceForge
    http://www.kuro5hin.org/story/2003/5/16/135349/207 A post in my former blog about RSS Bandit
    http://weblogs.asp.net/rosherove/archive/2004/01/04/47392.aspx A review of RSS Bandit by Roy Osherove

    MSN Search (beta) Result Description
    http://www.rssbandit.org/ The RSS Bandit webpage
    http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp?url=/library/en-us/dnexxml/html/xml02172003.asp The first article I wrote about RSS Bandit on MSDN
    http://www.marketingwithrss.com/rss-bandit-or-rssbandit/ SPAM
    http://www.25hoursaday.com/weblog/CategoryView.aspx?category=RSS%20Bandit Posts from the RSS Bandit category of my current weblog
    http://directory.google.com/Top/Reference/Libraries/Library_and_Information_Science/Technical_Services/Cataloguing/Metadata/RDF/Applications/RSS/News_Readers/ A catalog of RSS readers

The results from MSN Search were pertinent and in some cases moreso than the Google ones. Although MSN Search did allow a spam entry to make it into the top 5 results it also returned a link to all the RSS Bandit related posts on my blog which Google didn't pick up. Well, it doesn't look so inconceivable anymore that Microsoft will give Google a run for their money.

Then just wait until you see launch version of MSN Spaces and compare it to Blogger (although I'd prefer comparisons to LiveJournal or TypePad). The next few years are going to be fun.


 

Categories: MSN

November 11, 2004
@ 03:54 PM

Yesterday I literally stopped being the face of XML at Microsoft. From now on if you go to http://www.microsoft.com/xml or http://msdn.microsoft.com/xml you won't see my work blog or my picture welcoming you to the XML Developer Center at MSDN. It's a particularly bittersweet experience. I fought with MSDN for about a year and a half to get that site launched and for a while I felt that it was my baby. The new owner of the site, Irwin, is a great guy and I'm sure he'll do excellent things with it.

Speaking of transitions, I'm still trying to fit in at MSN. It's interesting going from being extremely knowledgeable about all the technologies I'm responsible for to returning blank stares when asked about some aspect of a spec I now own. Hopefully I'll have some downtime at next week's XML 2004 conference to bone up on the various specs about our backend infrastructure so I don't seem so clueless at the next feature costing meeting. :)

So far the new job's been awesome. Great people and the features I'm working on are killer. Best of all I not only get to deliver features for MSN Spaces but also Hotmail, MSN Messenger and even MyMSN. Of course, this means I attend lots and lots of cross-team meetings. Yay, fun...


 

Categories: Life in the B0rg Cube | MSN

November 10, 2004
@ 06:00 AM

A comment in Slashdot pointed out to me that it's been a day full of good news. On this day we find out that

  1. Halo 2 Released
  2. Firefox 1.0 Released
  3. U.S. Attorney General John Ashcroft Resigns

The last one is spectacularly good news [unless he is nominated as a Supreme Court Justice].


 

I saw The Incredibles this weekend and it was great. The animation was amazing, the story top notch and it had the right ratio of action to humor. This is probably one of the best super hero movies I've ever seen.

Rating: ***** out of *****

 


 

Categories: Movie Review