OAuthcalypse -- freakishly self-destructive Twitter insanity
scripting.com
scripting.com
That's why RSS is frozen. No developer should (or can) code against a moving
target. RSS has been in the same place for a long time and look at all that has
developed around it. If we kept changing our minds about how it worked,
eventually it would have amounted to nothing. But no one had the power to make
those changes, despite how much people complained -- so it stayed put.
This is what works.
He's one of the worst spec writers of all time, responsible for other epic fuckups like OPML, XML-RPC, and SOAP.
I have to say that I got a bad impression of Dave Winer late last decade when he posted a private email of mine on his blog without asking. And in our back and forth he mentioned how he was quite confused about people being upset by his habit of doing this....
ADDED: I wasn't too upset, except that he wasn't cooperative about my desire to edit it for public consumption.
I didn't want it published "as is" since it wasn't written for public consumption. There were personal details that detracted from the message, adjustments I wanted to tone down some of the rhetoric and some people (sources) who I referred to who needed better credit and/or real links.
I didn't say it was private, but in some of it I was "talking" directly to him. And it was certainly netiquette at the time that email was by default private; he said that was "crap", that he'd gone over this issue "countless times", that "off the record" was a privilege that had to be negotiated ahead of time and that he was "being very generous" in offering to delete it.
That message from him left a rather bad taste in my mouth.
My email was in response this public posting on his blog, start with the 4th paragraph of this page: http://www.scripting.com/1997/10/16.html
It wasn't abusive, although it was harsh on some bad players of the era, like UUNET, e.g. their actions prompted the editor of Boardwatch to commission a cover depicting the head of UUNET planting blue barrels of ANFO in MAE-East and I think MAE-West, referring to the OK City bombing a couple of years earlier.
The general issue of the day as I put it in my email:
"[T]he ISPs that are refusing to peer with others on equal terms are basically no longer offering Internet connectivity, but are instead offering a private network that happens to be connected to parts of the Internet. As I like to describe it, their unique selling proposition is "sign up with us, and we'll connect you to a steadily smaller portion of the Internet"."
UUNET's dominance at that time allowed them to play this sort of game and we still see it occasionally when a low cost provider irritates another. The end result of these power plays as I said at the time was "paying customers of the disconnecting ISP demand full connectivity or take their business elsewhere", although obviously that was a lot easier in the dialup era.
Doable, but annoying.
Platforms evolve. APIs get deprecated. Stuff either breaks or gets updated.
I am not super-complaining, just saying I see a reason for complaints. Especially since the update seems to make thinks more complicated without any real benefit.
^ Single-use apps--visualizations come to mind--deserve a pass. They do one neat thing and don't necessarily need to grow and evolve outside their niche. I'm sure one app or another will be missed.
"None will make it through this transition without being reconceived."
Say what? I can't imagine many apps will require reconcieving because an authorization API changed.
I don't see why anyone should be truly content with a platform or environment that refuses to evolve, progress will obviously cause breaking changes, but in the far majority of cases, the resulting fix will improve the existing application.
If someone is too lazy to take the chance to improve an application of their own, then they truly don't care about it in the first place, but then again if they are statisfied with the stagnation of their entire platofrm and environment, it makes sense that they would be statisfied with the stagnation of their own programs as well.
Software evolves, poor programmers complain and resist, good programmers go with the flow, but great programmers embrace this.
Frankly, I don't get it. Dave's argument appears to be that because the tooling he uses (Radio Userland?) doesn't support JSON, and therefore he will stop writing tools for Twitter (he wrote Twitter-related tools?).
He's the only person I've ever read who seems to prefer XML to JSON. Is there anyone else out there who feels the same way? What's the perceived advantage of XML over JSON? Can anyone shed some light on this?
In XML, I can add an attribute or a child node anywhere without affecting anything else. There is no easy way to extend JSON without jumping through ugly hoops to recreate a more XML-like data model.