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It's all spinning wheels and self-doubt until the first pot of coffee.

RSS vs XHTML - FIGHT!

In Formats for Blog Browsers, Dave writes:

I wanted to add a facility that would automatically back up all your weblog posts... "I bet RSS 2.0 could do this," I said out loud. And now that the code works, the answer is clear. It can. ... Then another lightning bolt hit me. ... What if someone made a browser that worked with this format? Let's call them Blog Browsers, apps specially designed for reading weblogs.
About syndication formats, Anil Dash writes:
I have a radical proposal for a ubiqitous content syndication format, applicable for almost any purpose, but extremely well suited for weblogs. ... My new syndication format is called XHTML.
In one corner, we have the syndication format taking over the document format. In the other corner, we have the document format taking over the syndication format! FIGHT!



Yeah, yeah, it's not quite that simple - but the opposed directions are interesting.

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Archived Comments

  • Dave Winer
    It won't be much of a fight. If they can get some content flowing in the format they want, and if that content isn't available in RSS, someone is certain to write a format driver for it.
  • John Burton
    Seeing the recent articles on just using XHTML instead of RSS were one of those moments when something just made sense and completly changed my thoughts about something. RSS is now looking like a solution in need of a problem.
  • Anil
    It won't be much of a fight. I agree... this isn't an "us vs. them" thing, it's a "what if..." thing.
  • l.m.orchard
    Well, presenting this as a "fight" was more or less me trying to be silly. I don't really expect a fight over it - er, well, yes I do, but then the contestants in that fight will be silly anyway. It's just very interesting to watch things go in both directions. In the end, hopefully, either or both ways end up being so simple that it's just a bare hiccup to support in aggregators. (Though I *do* worry about too many divergent standards.)
  • James Robertson
    I now read most web logs in my RSS Client tool, BottomFeeder - http://www.cincomsmalltalk.com/BottomFeeder. This site: http://webaccess.mozquito.com/features/index.xml shows what you can do via XSLT with an RSS based site. It's an XML based site, that displays formatted HTML in a browser. This is cool, since the site is now more accessible - both to those who prefer RSS aggregation, and to those who prefer a 'normal' browser