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Often the question of why do we need Atom comes up? Well, to be honest, we don’t. I mean, we don’t need RSS either, do we? But it is nice to have. Why? It makes our lives easier right? Well, it should. As an end user it can, but as a developer it can often make you bang your head against your desk because you long for the simplicity and ease that the users get.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m all in favor of user-centered design, and putting usability first. In fact, usability should be provided to developers as well as end users. Meaning? Meaning that I want to use standard XML tools to deal with XML. I want XML to actually be XML. RSS is supposed to be XML, but isn’t always XML. Atom is proposed to be XML, and will hopefully be XML. (See Also: Liberal XML parsing related to personality?)

Dave mentions that Borland has an RSS howto, and points to it. In reading The BDN Guide to RSS I find this:

RSS is more or less an XML dialect. I say “more or less” because there is no official XSD for it (although some
have tried) and because a number of sites produces RSS that follows the rules of neither RSS nor XML. This means
that if your application intends to consume RSS generated by persons unknown in the wilds of the internet, you
must be prepared to deal with some less-than-compliant documents. Since non-well-formed documents may be summarily
rejected by an off-the-shelf DOM, some authors resort to writing their own parsers.

Imagine if someone said “Hey, there’s this thing called HTML and you can probably view it in your web browser, but if not, some people resort to writing their own web browsers…” Thing is, 10 years ago that statement would not have seemed that far out there. Today though, I think we’ve made progress, and should continue to move forward.

Here’s what a software engineer has to say when faced with learning about RSS:

RSS is deeply splintered among two competing visions. One says RSS Stands for “RDF Site Summary”, the other says RSS stands for “Really Simple Syndication”. Within these factions, you’ll find numerous minor specification revisions. Most are similar, but differences remain. Writing parsers must be a nightmare.

The specs are really bad. I would have expected to find an official DTD or Schema, but they don’t exist. The
official RSS 2.0 specification is written using some really lousy HTML so it is impossible to print in a decent
way. I spent the last 20 minutes stripping out the garbage (like hardcoded fonts and extra HTML tables) so I could
print a legible version.

Deeply splitered between RDF and RSS? This poor soul doesn’t even know about Atom yet, when he does he’ll start to weep quitely to himself… Well, at least he’s already figured out that writing parsers is a nightmare.

Honestly I see RSS as somewhat equivalent to HTML 4.01, where you could use tables for layout and font tags, and it’s more or less ok, while I see Atom as being more like XHTML 1.0 where things are at least a little more clean and strict, and people try their best to avoid using tables unless they have tabular data to display, and wouldn’t think of throwing a font tag into the mix.

Yes, RSS is growing in popularity. It only took 4 years or so, which on the Internet is a really long time. Companies are choosing to implement RSS feeds. Why not? Everyone else is doing it? And it’s usually safe for Mr. Safe to do what everyone else is doing… Right?

Photo Matt has unsubscribe from the Lockergnome newsletters… Blink! There ya go, I just unsubscribed too. If you are an advocate of supporting web standards, the semantic web, valid code, or just plain quality, I’d urge you to think about doing the same. A nice follow up would be to email them explaining why you’ve unsubscribed, in the hopes that someone there actually cares.

Personally, I first remember noticing the Lockergnome stuff when it seemed to be a good resource for Windows folks, but later noticed they had web development stuff. I took a look and was not hugely impressed, but thought it was well enough done. Their redesign using CSS really did impress me, and make me think that perhaps I’d been missing something. They also became advocates of syndication, which was a good thing.

But now, the credibility is gone. Imaging if tomorrow you went to Zeldman‘s site and it was full of tables and <font> tags and spacer gifs. You’d think his site had been hijacked, or that he’d gone mad, or that it was perhaps April 1st, or maybe April 1st, 1997.

Goodbye Lockergnome, you almost had me at “CSS…”

Matrix Expands to Wisconsin … To quote our friend Bender, “We’re boned!” (See: The MATRIX and MATRIX Misconceptions…)

Photo Matt seems like a smart guy. So does Dave Shea, but I think they’ve both been had. Matt mentioned that Lockergnome was returning to what I’ll refer to as crappy markup practices. This was also commented on by Dave at mezzoblue talking about standards as a continuum.

Now, I don’t claim to be smarter than either of these guys, but I do claim to be able to look at a calendar. Mine says it’s March, and I happen to know that after March comes April. April 1st to be precise, which is also known as April Fools Day.

Obviously this is a prank by the people at Lockergnome. Oh sure, you think it’s too early, it’s not even mid-March! Ah, the element of surprise! If they mentioned this too close to April 1st, it would blow everything.

Mark my words, this has to be a joke. Because only a damn fool would consider tossing out clean, valid, semantic markup for total crap.

Oh, just in case I am wrong, feel free to apply that ‘damn fool’ label to the folks at Lockergnome…

I drive too many hours each week, so audio content is a good thing for me. No, I’m not a proud iPod owner, but I got a Rio last year, and it works just fine. I even built a dashboard mount for it…

So where do we find good audio content? Let’s take a look.

The Linux Show is one I usually try to catch. The sound quailty isn’t the greatest, probably due to 4 or more people all talking on phones from various places, sometimes airports, or hotels, or in the deep tunnel project… Besides that, the content is good if you’re into the Linux/open-ource stuff… They’re always looking to upgrade equipment, so it should only get better.

Your Mac Life used to provide downloadable shows each week, but have stopped since they now sell these through an Audible.com subscription or individually through the iTunes Music Store. Definitely a show for Mac-geeks. Hardcore Mac-geeks, though not hardcore *nix-Geeks, as they don’t get into tech issues quite that much but tend to focus more on the Apple-as-a-lifestyle and the Mac as your ‘digital hub’ type stuff. Still, an interesting show it is. It runs about two and a half hours. Oh, if you think time-shifting is an option, you can just record the stream, which they offer free for one week after each Wednesday night broadcast. If you do this, don’t tell them about it, as it will upset them because they feel they are losing money this way. I won’t go into business models here, do what you will…

WebTalkGuys Radio Show. Ok, we’ve covered Linux, and the Mac, what about Windows? ;) Ok, it’s not a Windows show, it’s a ‘web’ show, though you can tell it’s got a slight Windows lean to it. Anyway, they do have some interesting content. The show feels almost squeaky clean though. It’s definitely got a professional feel to it, though I don’t think I’ve ever heard any sort of controversy on the show, which makes it seem a little limp compared to the others. The do tend to have good interviews, but they lose points for suggesting that Google had created Atom. (Listen to the 2-14-2005 episode, about 5 minutes into it.) They call Atom a new kind of RSS that’s not RSS. Hurm…

LugRadio is the newcomer, with just two eposides under their belt. I’m still listening to the first one, but it’s good so far and they’ve gotten a lot of positive feedback. It’s done by 4 blokes in the UK. And I mean blokes! You might think it’s called “Luhg Ray-Dee-Oh” but it’s really “Loog Rah-Dy-Owe” Thick accents for sure! Besides that, it reminds me of the old Geeks in Space show, a bunch of guys sitting around discussing whatever. There really should be more of these shows. (I’d do one if I had the time, and people geographically close to me interested in such a thing.)

Besides the shows, there are also interviews.

Christopher Lydon occasionally has one that will interest me, but I almost always get good stuff from Doug Kaye at ITConversations. Doug does an awesome job of talking to interesting people. Since I can usually count on the quality of material from ITConversations, I wrote a script to parse the RSS feed with enclosures and download the newest stuff. It’s that good.

So concludes our radio notes for this time. Tune in again for more of the same! Did I miss a good show? Let me know…