Sunday June 06, 2004

Syndication feeds Hell

Before you continue reading, the topic covered in this posting has been widely discussed already. Following you'll find a rant on the nonsense of Syndication feeds, RSS0.9 ... RS2.0 and Atom. I just needed to write it to take it out of my system. You've been warned.

I've been following some of the technologies used and/or being developed around weblogging for a while now. I find very interesting how features and functionality keeps being added to the weblog world with (almost) no impact on the bloggers, their weblog systems take care of doing most (if not all) the job (ie: web pinging, trackbacks, etc). My interpretation is that [maybe] the reason for this it is that not always these features are brainchildren of technical oriented folks (you know, programmers). Or if they were thought by technical oriented folks, those folks knew the fact not everybody is techie. It's like the approach has been “It would be nice if when I post a weblog the following happens" instead of being “It would be nice if I can do the following when posting a weblog".

Granted that things get a little hairy when you get N ways of doing the same thing in a short period of time where N closely equates to the number of weblog software packages out there. In the end it's Darwinism in action and after a while things settle. Not a bad thing, even if the prevailing technology doesn't do it for its technical merits.

But there is an exception. One of the first and core features weblogs rely on, syndication feeds. Things went wild there and it is not that we are getting insects, reptiles or mammals. They are all almost the same. And *almost* is the problem. I won't go on the history, all the differences among the different types of feeds or their design problems, pretty good articles and weblogs have been written about it. One of my favorites is Mark Pilgrim's The myth of RSS compatibility. And don't forget to add Atom to hte mix.

It's just plainly insane. Their specifications shouldn't be called that. Think, if you are doing an application that will parse an XML document, what is one of the first things you want to do, ensure the XML document is valid. To do that you'd like to have a DTD or the XML-Schema handy. With the exception of Netscape's RSS 0.91, (that has DTD), none of the RSS or Atom specifications includes a DTD or XML-Schema(*). If you are a programmer that has to deal with syndication feeds, you know this is just the beginning of your nightmare.

A few of months ago I started working on some projects around collaboration and I've became a victim myself of what I call Syndication feeds Hell.

Addendum I

(*) If you find them please let me know, I've spent Google hours with no luck.