W3C and My RSS Spec

The credit line on the specification has been unchanged since Aug. 12, 2006: "This document is authored by the RSS Advisory Board and is offered under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution/Share Alike license, based on an original document published by the Berkman Center for Internet & Society."

We've never been asked to change that, by Dave Winer or anyone else.

There should never be something about 'respect' when it comes to a specification.

When I publish anything on the web, do I have to give credit to Tim Berners-Lee each time?

A specification isn't a badge of honor, it's a useful tool, one among many. Other than clarification of who is currently authority for, and making changes to, a specification, there should be no names on any spec or standard.

.

Funnily enough the changes were made based on a bug report by Tim Berners-Lee himself, who noticed link rot and missing links to specifications. Hence the commits by an W3C employee, who cleaned up the markup and apparently took the RSS 2.0 spec from the RSS Board website.

Which in effect is understandable from the employees point of view – an RSS board seems vastly more official and stable than a link on a random subdomain of Harvard’s Berkman Center.

Only if you have been a reader of Winer’s multiple different weblogs 15+ years back, you’ll know the issue. Very quick and abridged recap of the Feed Format Wars:

• Winer’s Userland Software took Netscape’s RSS 0.9x, slightly changed it and promoted it as official RSS.

• The RSS 1.0 Working group wanted an RSS in RDF terms and build a rival RSS 1.0.

• Winer published RSS 2.0 in response.

• People still had problems with the RSS 2.0 spec and some lack of clarity and formed a different effort in response, which later morphed into Atom which found a home at the IETF as an RFC.

• People still had questions about parsing RSS 2.0. In 2003 Winer moved RSS 2.0 to Harvard’s Berkman Center – he was a fellow at that time – transferred copyright and “ownership” of the spec and set up an RSS Advisory Board, which could “clarify” open questions.

http://scripting.com/2003/07.html#rss20News

• In 2004 Winer resigned from the RSS Advisory Board, writing that the “process for clarifying the spec is now well-understood.”

http://scripting.com/2004/06/25.html#When:1:30:36PM

• The RSS Advisory Board made minor changes or clarifications in the following years, but mostly is inactive.

https://www.rssboard.org/rss-change-notes

• Rogers Cadenhead, then chair, slightly rebooted the Advisory Board in 2006 with new members and a new website.

https://workbench.cadenhead.org/news/2851/rss-advisory-board...

• That doesn’t go well with Dave Winer:

https://workbench.cadenhead.org/news/2860/rss-means-never-be...

… and he pretty much declared it nonexistent

http://scripting.com/stories/2007/05/24/advisoryBoardFinale....

  ---

So, from Dave Winer’s perspective the RSS Board has nothing to do with the spec, which in his perspective only lives on a Harvard subdomain. The Board practically didn’t exist and linking to them is in error. The spec is ultimately frozen.

From the RSS Boards perspective it was set up, the initial founder resigned and threw a tantrum, when later the board took its mission seriously.

And from a random reader’s perspective the rssboard.org website seems massively more useful, by publishing the clarified specs, the ecosystem of minor specs around them, a best practice profile and for the first time in RSS history a changelog. Before that we only had Mark Pilgrim’s rant:

https://web.archive.org/web/20060409104917/http://diveintoma...

As usual the feed format wars is a masterpiece in people not working together.

(And thankfully almost nobody cares except the people who back then spend too much time following the wars in the plethora of different blogs, almost all now have fallen victim to linkrot.)