I can see now why he’s so offended.

From what I’ve heard, inventing RSS and then dining out for the rest of your career on being an ignorant

Lets get this straight, Dave Winer in no way, shape or form created RSS . No matter how you parse it. This bothers me because there were people who actually created syndication and RSS and because Dave Winer is there every day declaring himself the “father of RSS” and because the actual inventors are content to keep doing actual work everyone believe’s Winer.

That said, a little history. In Dave’s official RSS 2.0 history (found here: http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/rss/rssVersionHistory.html) he tries to make it look like he created syndication in that his first entry says…

scriptingNews format, designed by DW at UserLand. 12/27/97.

RSS 0.90, designed by Netscape, for use with my.netscape.com, which also supported scriptingNews format. The only thing about it that was RDF was the header, otherwise it was plain garden-variety XML. 3/15/99.

Note, even by his own account he did not invent RSS but what he is trying to make it look like is that he invented the idea of syndication a year and a half before Netscape came up with it. But he leaves out a few things. First, If you look at the entry Dave quotes it is very telling…

So I decided to take the plunge, and take the chicken out of the chicken and egg problem. Or is it the egg? Who knows. But from now on, Scripting News, in addition to being a HTML web page, is also an XML application. It’s a nice way if you’re nerdy to get a quick intro to what XML is about. And if you feel like really nerding out you could write a new kind of browser in Visual Basic or Java or Bongo or Filemaker or whatever. A great long weekend project. Let’s have fun!

In other words, his “scriptingNews format” was just plain vanilla XML and he had no concept of what could be done with it (aka there was no aggregator in sight nor did he think of it as a way to push data).

The second really big thing Winer leaves out is an entry that might have looked something like this…

Rammanathan V. Guha submits Channel Definition Format to W3C as a proposed standard (CDF). 3/10/97.

Or one that looked something like this…

Microsoft releases the first Aggregator as its “Channel Bar” with Internet Explorer 4. 9/30/97.

In other words, Dave was just copying Microsoft and doing it badly. If there is a “Father of Syndication” its Rammanathan V. Guha and if there is a “Father of RSS” its Dan Libby. Dave claims of “popularizing RSS” or “boot strapping the adoption of RSS” and I can’t refute that but the idea that he invented RSS is just BS.

So this journalist calls him a Scientologist, and Dave takes it as a personal attack! Dave can’t possibly be a thinking being, he has to be a context-free parser of some sort, because no sentient being could twist themselves in their own hypocrisy as fast as Dave.

See:

http://texturbation.com/blog/?p=353

And:

http://twitter.com/davewiner/statuses/212974692

Quoth:

>>> Winer dares to compare my profession to Catholicism?

That is the worst insult I have ever received, from anybody, ever.

I regard that as a personal insult.

Winer, for want of a more erudite insult, can go fuck himself.

From what I’ve heard, inventing RSS and then dining out for the rest of your career on being an ignorant blowhard blogging moron is the new Scientology.

So. There.

Dave Winer is clearly a Scientologist.