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Comment by outsidetheparty | Hacker News Reader

My strong impression at the time was that the primary impetus for establishing Atom was that Dave Winer was abrasive and opinionated, and some people just didn't like him very much.

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That's part of it. The other part is that Dave Winer can't write a proper specification to save his life.

That seems extremely petty if true.

FWIW, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_web_syndication_tec... notes that Atom was a side-effect of RSS being frozen. Also FWIW, Dave gave Atom (then Echo) a tentative early endorsement:

"If and when it reaches closure, I will recommend to UserLand that they support the format, both for input and output, and I will help to the extent I can to write drivers for the software. I will continue to answer questions for the people working on Echo, and offer my opinion when it appears to be welcome, but will step back when it is not." — http://backend.userland.com/2003/06/26

And, true to his word, Dave added support for Atom in UserLand products in 2007.

Mainly, it was Dave not bothering to clarify how to include HTML in the RSS feed, instead saying, "the spec is the spec and it's not changing!"

IIRC that's always been supported via CDATA.

For a feeling of the scene at the time, this blog post by the extremely mild mannered Tim Bray may be instructive:

http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/200x/2003/06/23/SamsPie

It did seem extremely petty, yeah -- on both sides tbh. As an outside observer who just wanted to be able to build a feed and have it work, it was really disheartening to watch.

I and another old mutual friend of Dave's were both on his pre-RSS DaveNet mailing list for a long time past when it stopped being interesting, and we would always joke about how we were both afraid to ask him to remove us from DaveNet, because whenever somebody else would ask to be removed, it would hurt Dave's feelings, and he'd talk smack about them behind their back after begrudgingly removing them, so we suspected we weren't the only ones afraid to unsubscribe. At least RSS made it possible to unsubscribe from his feed without hurting his feelings. (My friend's mom was his high school teacher in New York, and his wife was Dave's first kiss in high school, so they had some hilarious stories!)

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