A few days ago I wrote up a long post about the RSS/Echo syndication format fiasco, but I didn’t post it. It’s not that I don’t care about what’s going on, it’s just that I do not want to take sides or become a part of the debate.
I am building some web sites right now that take advantage of syndication in a very big way, and I realize that if those sites are going to be successful that I need to support all the various syndication formats that are being used by all of the mainstream blogging tools. As long as the format is open it’s not that much harder to support it than it is to support a single format. Some people worry that RSS and Web site syndication is going to be taken over by industry giants like Microsoft. It’s a valid concern because if Microsoft does come out with their own proprietary version of RSS, they may close the format so that only Microsoft-centric tools can read and write it.
So if Echo (or whatever it comes to be called) turns into a successful syndication format and the vendor tools for blogging and web publishing build in support for it, then I will in turn support it with the sites I’m currently building. In the meantime, there are perfectly valid syndication formats like RSS 0.9 and RSS 2.0 that work perfectly well and can be safely used to build prototype tools and collaborative web sites.
Posted by Cameron Barrett at July 1, 2003 03:02 PM