On Wednesday, Dave penned an odd little essay on RSS vs. ATOM. His thesis is that users should never see the debate between RSS and ATOM. Why, you ask? Because right now “RSS” is the de facto name for all of the syndication formats, and it clearly helps Dave’s ego if nobody ever suggests that we start calling things what they are. Further, it’s no far stretch to believe that if we quit talking about, and debating, syndication formats, we could find ourselves locked into one format blindly.
Dave wants to hide all references to ATOM from the users because they “don’t care.” I agree, wholeheartedly, that users don’t care. Right now they only care that it works. But is that how we want it to be?
If we apply Dave’s attitude to other consumer products, it seems much less innocuous. Should we care if a toy is made in a sweatshop versus being made under adequate working conditions? Why? It’s just a different “flavor” of the same thing! They both work the same way! In fact, let’s stop even talking about sweatshops because they just confuse the user.
Same could be said for the treatment of animals on factory farms. I’m no ELF Member, but given the choice between eating an animal that was raised humanely and one that was raised in atrocious conditions, I’ll take the former. Hiding the details from the users makes their lives blissful, maybe, but they’ll still be ignorant.
Does that mean we should put the ATOM vs. RSS decision front-and-center? Hell, no! But hiding it from the users is equally silly.
Aside: isn’t there a conflict between Dave telling other people they shouldn’t discuss ATOM in public and him taking great offense at Jason Calacanis asking that he quit deriding him on his blog? Hmm…
I also find it interesting that Dave can’t even follow his own advice. “Test your reader against all formats with significant installed bases,” he says. Yet he’s quite vocal about the fact that if someone is using ATOM, he can’t read their feed in his “cutting edge” river of news browser. (A problem that would not exist if is feeds’ authors were using Feedburner, ironically enough)
Also? Cut the bullshit. Nobody has ever, anywhere, said or suggested that Dave “is a bad person because his feed is RSS 2.0.” Never. Not even in private.
They have called it an inferior format, they have maligned the spec, and they have trumpeted superior formats and specs. They have criticized Dave for his role in making the spec as shoddy as it is and they’ve probably called him a bad person for his little crusade against ATOM, but never once has a single person suggested that he was a bad person because he used RSS.
The thing about RSS vs Atom is that, if not for Dave and a couple other sycophants, I’m not sure there would even be a debate. Speaking for myself and every other Atom supporter I know, we aren’t fighting.
We all know that RSS support will have to be built into aggregators for the foreseeable future and I think most of us have no problem with people using RSS 2.0 feeds if it works for them. In fact, I can remember several occasions when I heard an Atom supporter specifically tell someone that it probably wasn’t worth the effort to change their feed right now
The issue for Dave and the sycophants though is that Atom is superior to RSS and everyone with half a brain knows it. Ask an RSS 2.0 supporter to name one advantage that RSS has over Atom and they can’t do it. So eventually, if market forces are allowed to progress as they normally would, Atom will win because people will pick Atom for their new projects and those new products will eventually supplant what we currently use.
Its simple logic, if both products are free and one has superior features that product will be the one that people choose in a free society.
So again, Atom supporters have no reason to fight we just need to sit back and let nature take its course. But the RSS side, if it is to keep their inferior format alive must turn this into a religious war where the question is “who side are you on?” not “which format makes more sense?”
Which is where this most recent rant comes in because, as in any religious war one of Dave’s main goals is to erase the competition from existence so no one can make the choice for themselves. “If Atom is never mentioned people will never find out about it and it will eventually disappear”
As always Dave is all for choice as long as you are sure to choose what he wants you to choose.
Tom, you said, “the thing about RSS vs Atom is that, if not for Dave and a couple other sycophants, I’m not sure there would even be a debate.” You haven’t gone quite far enough.
The thing about RSS vs Atom is that, if not for dave, Atom would not exist. Atom was created to liberate feed users from the capricious whims of dave and his “standard.” dave created this situation all by himself, if he wasn’t such an asshole, people might have been able to work with him.