Eye on Winer

Dave Winer’s latest post borders on self-parody:

Mozilla engineering VP, Mike Schroepfer explained that Microsoft tends to implement technology already approved by the standards working groups, in a different way, and then says their implementation is the standard. Sounds like something Hillary Clinton would do …

This is a nice example of how A-list techbloggers often have Z-list minds when it comes to more intellectually demanding subjects than, say, Flickr-to-Twitter. We’ve been encouraged lately to say more about Winer’s foray into U.S. politics, but the vapidity of the above comment shows why it’s difficult. He’s the kind of political advocate who gives comfort to the other side by living down to their expectations.

In the same post, Winer falsifies the history of RSS:

When Netscape, the company that spawned Mozilla, wanted to implement a format for content syndication in 1999, they did it outside of the W3C because they were sick of the dirty politics bigger companies that felt more significant had been using against them. There was prior art, but they trampled it, because (you guessed) they felt more significant than those that came before.

When Netscape created RSS, the project was led by Dan Libby and Ramanathan Guha. The prior art was the Meta Content Framework and RDF, two formats cocreated by Guha. Winer thinks that his scriptingNews XML format was the prior art for RSS (and thus justifies his retroactive claim to have invented somebody else’s format). ScriptingNews wasn’t implemented outside of Winer’s company when Netscape launched RSS.

Another premise of Winer’s comment is just as dubious. Guha and Netscape were working with the W3C on RDF at the time RSS got started. Winer’s projecting when he claims Netscape was thumbing its nose at the W3C.

This entry was posted on Thursday, March 27th, 2008 at 7:00 am and is filed under Dave, RSS. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.