This post originated from an RSS feed registered with Agile Buzz
by James Robertson.
Original Post: Bill Kearney, obsessed with Dave Winer
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.
Ok, so folks have been asking me lately, why is the crap Winer calls 2.0 worse than using the 1.0 format?
Here's one perfect example. Let's say you download an RSS file and save it. Let's say you download a lot of them. Or let's even say your browser, when clicking on RSS files, downloads it and then hands it over (via MIME types) to a local program for handling it. Well, surprise, surprise, a 1.0 file contains it's own URL. The file itself tells you what it's talking about and where it came from. A file using 2.0 has no way to do this. How dumb is that?
Hmm. Let's see - under that criteria
Web Pages are useless. The url isn't embedded
Most XML documents on the web are useless for the same reason
Why do I care if the feed contains an URL? I'm not typically working with RSS files locally, I'm working with them over the net. I get the URL when I grab the feed. If it's redirected, my aggregator silently follows and changes my subscription appropriately. Once I've got an RSS document, it doesn't stay in that format - I create Smalltalk objects from it, and one of those objects - the Feed - knows the URL. And knows how to update the URL on demand.
Bill goes on to explain all the other nifty things RSS 1.0 can do better than 2.0 in a non-blog context - which is fine. For many other uses, I'm sure that 1.0 has more power. For blogs and newsfeeds, RSS 2.0 is simpler and qualifies as good enough. IMHO, RSS 1.0 is overkill for syndication of simple content. Eco/Pie/Atom is moving towards needless complexity as well.
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