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Anti-ATOM Crusading

August 15th, 2007 by EyeOnWiner

This post is a reader-submission from an EoW friend that we’ll call “Tom”

Remember Ted…

Dear Ted

Your geeks are taking both of us for a ride.

I was subscribing to your feed, generally reading all your updates, and now I see the feed moved.

I was going to post a note saying that it would be better if you redirected to the new feed, but then I saw that your new feed isn’t RSS, to which I ask – why??

Do you want to lose subscribers?

Because that’s what happened. I can’t read your feed anymore Ted. I’ll survive, but I will miss your posts.

So it’s odd that today, a mere 7 months later, Dave is suddenly the bastion of syndication fairness…

Edit all docs and specs accordingly. Everywhere it says “Atom is better” remember “Users don’t care.”

Facebook is doing the same thing, and I’m pulling back from endorsing them until they take the religion out of their docs. I won’t help propogate the myth that one format is better than the other. Users don’t care.

If you must answer the question “What’s the difference between RSS and Atom?” just say they’re different flavors of the same thing. Even better would be to find a way to avoid raising the question at all. Test your reader against all formats with significant installed bases, and do what you can to keep the number of formats to a minimum.

What makes this even more amusing is that the issue here isn’t Facebook supporting RSS over Atom but simply that they mention Atom in their documentation. Apparently in Dave’s world it is now a sin to even mention Atom without also paying tribute to RSS.

(I should point out that in every official Facebook document I was able to find the company was careful to use “Atom/RSS” but something had to set Dave off)

EyeOnWiner adds: isn’t it curious that Dave’s argument against mentioning ATOM is that “users don’t care” but as soon as someone actually starts using ATOM, the users do care. Specifically, Dave cares. He ignores the possibility that some users feel the same way about ATOM that he does about RSS.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, August 15th, 2007 at 7:42 pm and is filed under Dave, Friends, RSS, Reader Submissions. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

4 Responses to “Anti-ATOM Crusading”

  1. zaphodim says:
    August 15, 2007 at 9:05 pm

    That’s a very interesting redacted post, Mr. Mancuso. Dave is always retracting inflammatory posts, so if you see stuff like that, be sure to save a copy.

    I recall when winer handed control of the RSS spec to a committee, and promised to keep a hands-off attitude once an “impartial body” took control. But now he’s determined to rewrite and control the spec. And make no mistake, if you write guidelines for RSS, as dave wants to do, then you are rewriting the spec.

    If winer writes technical articles on RSS, he will ignite another war for control of the spec. And he knows it. I guess he already got beaten up, otherwise he wouldn’t have removed those comments.

    Remember dave, the immortal words of Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, “Your right to swing your fist ends where my nose begins.” You have a right to free speech, but you have no right to start fights.

  2. Atomic says:
    August 15, 2007 at 11:20 pm

    I think I found the offending verbiage.

    http://www.facebook.com/help.php?page=23

    Click on the “How do I choose whether to use Atom or RSS? What’s the difference?” link.

    Not evangelizing, but answering a question that some users may have, and bother to investigate.

  3. Tom says:
    August 15, 2007 at 11:30 pm

    Thanks, I was looking in the Developer Documentation. That is most definitely enough to send Winer into a ‘tizzy. But the truth is that it goes out of its way to be fair even saying “and the differences between them don’t add up to much”

    The bottom line is the author makes a pretty straightforward statement. He says…

    “It contains a little bit more information, like links to the public profiles of the authors of Notes”

    So my question is, does Dave dispute the factual statement made there? If so, wouldn’t any logical person conclude that Atom WAS the better way to go?

  4. Bullshit Mancuso says:
    August 15, 2007 at 7:56 pm

    Dave posted and deleted another entry today about RSS:

    I would like to provide advice for documenting RSS

    The RSS community has suffered because a small number of people say what I write about RSS is “warfare.”

    Even so, I would like to write about RSS.

    You may not think I had anything to do with its creation or success, or that RSS is a bad, or not as good as something else, but I like it, as do a lot of other people, and even if I had nothing to do with creating it, I am entitled to my opinion, right?

    I wrote about this the other day in my apology to Jason Calacanis, because a lot of his concerns were about what I said here on my blog, not in the session at Gnomedex. I tried to draw a very solid line. What I say here is my business, it’s fine if you disagree (please do) but not okay to question my right to an opinion. And further I’d like it to be clear that writing, in itself, is not an act of violence, even if you disagree with what the writing says. (Although of course there are exceptions.)

    Evelyn Beatrice Hall: “I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.”

    So I ask this question, before doing anything. If I were to write some guidelines, to help people writing docs for end-users about RSS, even if you don’t agree with my advice, will you support my right to write and publish it?

    And if you say you will support it, will you stick by your committment? And if people call it warfare, will you disagree with them, not quietly, but actively?

    In other words, unless there’s some support, I’m not going to stick my neck out, because I know it doesn’t work. For us to move forward, at least some of the good people who use RSS will have to play a role in supporting its evolution, not sit on the sidelines and wait for someone else to do it.

    Of course, in the spirit of transparency, I’d like to do more than provide advice for documenting RSS, but let’s start with something relatively simple. :-)