Driving on old pavement being ripped up

Lockergnome’s RSS Resource: If RSS is broken, why does PodCasting work?. A very good question, in my opinion, and one I’ve been asking ever since the RSS-is-broken meme crescendoed into the Atom (née Echo, née PIE) movement.

The answer: RSS isn’t broken. It may be clumsy for stating certain kinds of relationships, but it’s not broken. The guys doing Atom are spending time ripping up pavement that, in many cases, hasn’t even fully been driven on yet. I love what’s happened with enclosures and Podcasting. That’s the sort of innovation that XML syndication needs, user experience and business models; not “innovation” in how the underlying content is expressed. Where RSS is broken, in terms of how users experience it, it’s not something that can be fixed by changing the tagset, but must be addressed at the application level and the paradigm level. (For an example of the latter, look at the drag and drop subscription innovations showcased by NetNewsWire, or the built-in RSS reader in Firefox.)