intertwingly

Nick Bradbury: Well, let me just reiterate that if the board intends solely to clarify the spec, I’ll toss roses your way.  Unresolved issues such  as whether markup is supported in elements other than description continue to be a burden to RSS developers, end users and feed producers alike.  In the past week alone I’ve dealt with three separate bug reports that were caused by HTML in elements other than description, and I’d love to stop spending time on this sort of thing.

The RSS Advisory Board seems to be having some sort of identity crisis.  Despite the temporary confusion, the license of the RSS 2.0 specification clearly permits derivative works to be created without requiring the permission of anyone, under certain conditions.  The current draft doesn’t meet those conditions, but I’m confident that this will be corrected with the final version.

Being allowed to clarify the specification is one thing.  Whether or not others feel like Nick does is yet another.  In the long run, the success of the work currently under the working title of RSS 2.0.2 depends little on what Harvard thinks, but instead depends very much on what people like Nick and companies like Microsoft actually do.

The leadership that Rogers is providing has been exemplary.  I’ve been quietly aligning the Feed Validator RSS 2.0 test cases to track to the drafts that he has produced.  I believe this work is important and should continue.