[1]A history of the sprawling personality clashes over RSS:
[original.jpg]
Sinclair Target's long, deeply researched history of the format wars
over RSS are an excellent read and a first-rate example of what
Charlie Stross has called "the beginning of history": for the first
time, the seemingly unimportant workaday details of peoples' lives
are indelibly recorded and available for people researching history
(for example, Ada Palmer points out that we know very little about
the everyday meals of normal historical people, but the daily
repasts of normal 21 centurians are lavishly documented).
I was there for the RSS format wars: I had some of the key players
like Rael Dornfest and Aaron Swartz in my home while these flamewars
were going on, and I talked about their mailing list contributions
as they worked through the issues; I also was there during
face-to-face arguments among some of they key players (I volunteered
for several years as a conference committee member for the O'Reilly
P2P and Emerging Tech conferences, where much of this played out).
That all said, I think Target's piece focuses too much on the micro
and not enough on the macro. The individual differences and
personalities in the RSS wars were a real drag on the format's
adoption and improvement, but that's not what killed RSS.
What killed RSS was the growth of digital monopolies, who created
silos, walled gardens, and deliberate incompatibility between their
services to prevent federation, syndication, and interoperability,
and then [2]fashioned a set of legal weapons that let them invoke
the might of the state to shut down anyone who dared disrupt them.
As Target says, the early promise of the internet was summed up by
Kevin Werbach's characterization: "allowing businesses and
individuals to retain control over their online personae while
enjoying the benefits of massive scale and scope." But thanks to
generations of antitrust malpractice and financialization, we now
live in an era of five massive services filled with screenshots from
the other four.
The individuals who made RSS were and are flawed vessels, like all
humans, myself included. They did brilliant things and dumb things.
But their errors didn't kill RSS: a massive, seismic regulatory and
economic shift did. It's like blaming rhino conservationists'
internal disputes - rather than climate change - for the decline in
rhinos' numbers. Yes, internal struggle may make people less
effective in making change, but the external forces need to be taken
into consideration here.
The fork happened after Dornfest announced a proposed RSS 1.0
specification and formed the RSS-DEV Working Group-which would
include Davis, Swartz, and several others but not Winer-to get it
ready for publication. In the proposed specification, RSS once again
stood for "RDF Site Summary," because RDF had been added back in to
represent metadata properties of certain RSS elements. The
specification acknowledged Winer by name, giving him credit for
popularizing RSS through his "evangelism." But it also argued that
RSS could not be improved in the way that Winer was advocating. Just
adding more elements to RSS without providing for extensibility with
a module system would "sacrifice scalability." The specification
went on to define a module system for RSS based on XML namespaces.
Winer felt that it was "unfair" that the RSS-DEV Working Group had
arrogated the "RSS 1.0" name for themselves. In another mailing list
about decentralization, he wrote that he had "recently had a
standard stolen by a big name," presumably meaning O'Reilly, which
had convened the RSS-DEV Working Group. Other members of the
Syndication mailing list also felt that the RSS-DEV Working Group
should not have used the name "RSS" without unanimous agreement from
the community on how to move RSS forward. But the Working Group
stuck with the name. Dan Brickley, another member of the RSS-DEV
Working Group, defended this decision by arguing that "RSS 1.0 as
proposed is solidly grounded in the original RSS vision, which
itself had a long heritage going back to MCF (an RDF precursor) and
related specs (CDF etc)." He essentially felt that the RSS 1.0
effort had a better claim to the RSS name than Winer did, since RDF
had originally been a part of RSS. The RSS-DEV Working Group
published a final version of their specification in December. That
same month, Winer published his own improvement to RSS 0.91, which
he called RSS 0.92, on UserLand's website. RSS 0.92 made several
small optional improvements to RSS, among which was the addition of
the tag soon used by podcasters everywhere. RSS had officially
forked.
The fork might have been avoided if a better effort had been made to
include Winer in the RSS-DEV Working Group. He obviously belonged
there; he was a prominent contributor to the Syndication mailing
list and responsible for much of RSS' popularity, as the members of
the Working Group themselves acknowledged. But, as Davis wrote in an
email to me, Winer "wanted control and wanted RSS to be his legacy
so was reluctant to work with us." Winer supposedly refused to
participate. Tim O'Reilly, founder and CEO of O'Reilly, explained
this in a UserLand discussion group in September, 2000:
[3]The Rise and Demise of RSS [Sinclair Target/Motherboard]
[4]Let's block ads! [5](Why?)
(Via [6]Boing Boing)
__________________________________________________________________
My original entry is here: [7]A history of the sprawling personality
clashes over RSS. It posted Fri, 18 Jan 2019 21:51:38 +0000.
Filed under: tech,
References
1.
https://boingboing.net/2019/01/09/triplets-be-damned.html
2.
http://locusmag.com/2019/01/cory-doctorow-disruption-for-thee-but-not-for-me/
3.
https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/a3mm4z/the-rise-and-demise-of-rss
4.
https://blockads.fivefilters.org/
5.
https://blockads.fivefilters.org/acceptable.html
6.
https://boingboing.net/feed
7.
https://www.prjorgensen.com/?p=2539
