Circle of Life
Aquarion (reflecting on RSS 0.90):
If you want to put someone elses /content/ on your site, or in your program, go ahead. That wasn't what RSS was designed for either, but what it was perverted to. ESF is designed so it can't easily be perverted. Clear, and hardly any overhead at all.
Joe Hanna (also reflecting on RSS 0.90):
I maintain that RSS is such a technology. It's designed purpose is the syndication of "news" items from individual websites to a portal website, to be more specific to the MyNetscape portal website. It was *not* designed to be of any particular use to bloggers, aggregators, or metadata providers, but it *does* serve them and others.
Dave Winer (reflecting on RSS 0.91):
Half of RSS 0.91 was scriptingNews format, which was totally designed to model a weblog in XML
Dave Winer (on RSS 2.0):
RSS is not a brilliant format. It is a compromise. It is for syndicating news feeds. That's all it is for, for the 18,000th time.
Creativity and innovation always builds on the past.
The past always tries to control the creativity that builds upon it.
Free societies enable the future by limiting this power of the past.
Ours is less and less a free society.
P.S.: Apologies to Disney for the title that I have assigned to this post.