This post originated from an RSS feed registered with Agile Buzz by James Robertson. Original Post: Conspiracy, or something simpler? Feed Title: Cincom Smalltalk Blog - Smalltalk with Rants Feed URL: http://www.cincomsmalltalk.com/rssBlog/rssBlogView.xml Feed Description: James Robertson comments on Cincom Smalltalk, the Smalltalk development community, and IT trends and issues in general. Latest Agile Buzz Posts Latest Agile Buzz Posts by James Robertson Latest Posts From Cincom Smalltalk Blog - Smalltalk with Rants

Dare points to the rising number of Atom feeds coming out of Blogger (the default choice over there now) - and laments that he can't read such feeds with RSS Bandit. I'm kind of surprised that he hasn't added suport; it was pretty simple to support Atom 0.2 (I added that months ago, because one of the users of BottomFeeder actually asked for it). I ignored Atom 0.3 for awhile, but then I got an email from someone telling me that Bf was handling 0.3 feeds oddly. I added a new handler for 0.3, and all was well again.

Here's why it's not that hard for me to add new formats, so long as they are relatively close in spirit to RSS - I don't keep the XML documents around. Bf parses the XML document, and then a framework originally designed and built by Dave Murphy maps all the relevant information to an object model. It turns out that the object model we built for RSS applies to Atom easily, so it was just a matter of mucking with the object mappings in a new handler class. When I finally added Atom 0.3 support, it took me about 20 minutes.

Back to the original topic. While Dave Winer assumes malice, Dare assumes the much older rationale - stupidity:

1. Always and inevitably everyone underestimates the number of stupid individuals in circulation.
2. The probability that a certain person be stupid is independent of any other characteristic of that person.
3. A stupid person is a person who causes losses to another person or to a group of persons while himself deriving no gain and even possibly incurring losses.
4. Non-stupid people always underestimate the damaging power of stupid individuals. In particular non-stupid people constantly forget that at all times and places and under any circumstances to deal and/or associate with stupid people always turns out to be a costly mistake.
5. A stupid person is the most dangerous type of person

Unless Google does have something up their sleeve?. Who knows? In the meantime, I support the Atom format, regardless of how many bricks I throw at it....