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Comment by blasdel | Hacker News Reader

Atom exists because everything Dave Winer touches becomes a clusterfuck, overwhelmed with problems both technical (http://diveintomark.org/archives/2004/02/04/incompatible-rss) and social (http://diveintomark.org/archives/2003/04/21/whats_your_winer...). The rest of us needed a format free from his influence or control, one with comprehensive specifications that he couldn't silently edit ('frozen' doesn't apply to him).

Please stop producing any flavor of RSS. Absolutely stop producing the same content in multiple formats, that's just inane. I am not not aware of any software not written by and for Dave that cannot parse Atom (iTunes does handle Atom podcast feeds, but they must be valid to work). If you really care about ancient clients, run your Atom feeds through Feedburner, they can take care of it for you: http://www.google.com/support/feedburner/bin/answer.py?hl=en...

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You may have an argument here, but your ad-hominem attack made me tune out pretty much immediately.

It's not an attack on him, it's a warning to others.

All these technologies are yours, except those that Dave Winer claims ownership of. Attempt no landing there.

You can't back that up with anything I ever said or "claimed." I and my company disclaimed ownership of everything, even the copyright on the spec I wrote.

1. There are only really 4 versions of RSS, and Winer wrote two of them. There were 3 different groups involved, which was the problem - the problem isn't having newer versions.

2. You could say the same of Mark Pilgrim's social problems. He is very difficult to get along with, is very arrogant and lead a crusade against Winer for years. He on one hand argued that RSS was fragmented and incompatible, but his solution to that was to start yet another syndication format.

You are forgetting that what made syndication popular was the simplicity of RSS. There were other formats before it, and there have been formats since - but the ease of implementation and simplicity of RSS ushered in a whole new era of services and nothing less than blogging itself, podcasting and all the services since that have built on that foundation (ie. 'the social web').

That's not all that fair on Mark (who yes, can be just as bad) - there was a desire to fix things within RSS 2.0, but Winer refused to update the spec to fix things like the Reuters problem. Atom seemed like the only way to move things forward at the time...

There may ideally be only 4 versions of RSS, but Winer was responsible for 6 of them :)

Mark may be an asshole, but he's nearly always correct (save for his recent Apple II fixation), and he follows up instead of trying to edit his mistakes from the record. He has a lot of company in hating Winer, basically everyone Dave's ever worked on anything with.

Here's some examples of classic Dave: http://www.metafilter.com/26701/ http://www.metafilter.com/33699/ http://workbench.cadenhead.org/news/2881/ (note that rcade, the author of the last link, was Dave's sole defender in the earlier ones). Here's some freshly curated ridiculousness: http://eyeonwiner.org/ http://davewinerscrazytrain.tumblr.com/

RSS is no simpler than Atom, not even when used naïvely — it's just easier to break. It was successful because Winer was at one time successful, but after he managed to attack and alienate everyone else in the field, they moved on and started over with a clean slate.

urgh.. I have no idea how this turned into me defending Winer since I only wanted to respond to the Pilgrim posts which were FUD (the two examples you originally posted).

You don't have to convince me that either of these guys are nutters - I know it all too well.

My point is that there are two sides to this story (well, 4 really) - that RSS popularized feeds and that in the past 10 years despite all the effort nothing has been made easier for devs, if anything it is even more complicated (esp with the namespace extensions from iTunes)

Okay why does this get moderated up to 22 points if Hacker News is such a respectful place.

I don't know who this guy is and what axes he has to grind (and the 22 people who think this is an important comment), but RSS is a huge success, anything but a "clusterfuck."

And River2 fully supports Atom. That's just outrageous that you say my software doesn't support it.

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