Re: Use cases

On Jan 5, 2011, at 18:09, Sam Ruby wrote:

> On 01/05/2011 10:51 AM, Henri Sivonen wrote:
>> On Jan 5, 2011, at 17:38, Sam Ruby wrote:
>> 
>>> Additionally, there are feed formats, such as RSS 2.0, which do not
>>> provide a means to clearly identify the mime type of descriptions.
>> 
>> Don't we have Atom to address this problem?
> 
> Let me know when you personally have recoded all feed producers.  :-)

This isn't on my personal todo list. Should I understand that you've given up on this being on the collective todo list of the people who generate feeds? Or did you never consider it to be on such a collective todo list? That is, when we started Atom, did we not think we could rid the world of the troubles of RSS?

My view today, which obviously wasn't my view back in 2003, is that we shouldn't have done Atom but we should have done to RSS 2.0 (over the objections of Dave Winer) what the WHATWG did to HTML (over the objections of the W3C membership).

> Similarly, let me know when you have produced ubiquitous HTML5 parsers for all environments, as you clearly have presumed when you stated[2] "addressed by putting an HTML5 parser at the start of the XML processing pipeline". :-)

This is on my todo list. I'll let you know if I make concrete (expressed in code) progress.

However, I think the Java code that I have written validates the technical feasibility of the solution I've proposed for Norm's use case #1. That I personally haven't yet ported it to runtime environment Foo doesn't mean that it makes sense to design a different solution instead.

I see the smiley, but I think your quip comes close to the fundamental Web standard proposal error: A solution has been designed and implemented in at least one browser but not yet in every browser and someone says the solution doesn't work because it hasn't been implemented in browser X and proposes a new solution that hasn't been implemented anywhere yet.

> My suggestion for this group is that while we look to improve things whenever possible, but remain grounded in reality in terms of deployed formats and tool chains.

Sure.

However, it is important to note that even if it is reality that a tool has some constraints (e.g. RSS tools being unable to communicate non-HTML payloads) and it is reality that a population of authors want to do something that seems to clash with those constraints (e.g. a population of authors that want to transmit DocBook content), it doesn't *necessarily* follow that there's a real-world practical clash between the two (e.g. the authors who want to transmit DocBook content must do so using RSS). The two might be sufficiently disjoint (e.g. DocBook authors use Atom so the restrictions of RSS don't matter).

-- 
Henri Sivonen
hsivonen@iki.fi
http://hsivonen.iki.fi/

Received on Thursday, 6 January 2011 13:12:02 UTC