When I say "Prince" do you think of a pop idol of the 80's that
flirted for a while with an unpronouncable symbol? Now when I
say "Prince Charles" do you think of a person with somewhat flappy
ears?
By the logic
that Dave is applying to RSS, Dave would have you believe that they
are the same individual. He claims that scripting news's rss
feed (in which all the elements are in the http://backend.userland.com/rss2
namespace is as valid RSS as one in which the elements are in no
namespace.
And then he talks about parsers which properly handle namespaces
as if they are the ones that are broken.
I thererefore must change my opinon. Where I previously
thought that RSS 2.0 suffered from a simple
omission, now I must consider RSS 2.0 fundamentally busted.
Sorry, Dave.
Update: now that there is
recognition that the spec is imperfect in regards to
namespaces, my opinion goes back to this being a simple
omission.
Dave Winer is within his rights to decide not to use namespaces in whatever spec he comes up with for syndicating Radio content.
However spreading FUD about namespace usage in specifications smacks of ignorance. Until RSS, I had never seen a deployed XML vocabulary that didn't use namespaces except for XML config files.
I considered writing more about this in my diary but I seem to remember being warned about Winer's vindictive nature and sensitivity to critisicm so I'll leave my comments as this.
No one knows everything and people often make mistakes.
However, it is one thing to not be a domain expert in a particular field making mistakes and another to make seemingly authoritative pronouncements without research or full knowledge of the subject matter.
Dave is widely read and is somewhat of a technology pundit. He shouldn't be making unfounded statements without careful consideration.