Re: Shipping Atom products prematurely

["Bill Kearney" <wkearney@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

> I'm not naming names here, but I have two vendors in particular in
> mind. I *don't* mean the smaller aggregator-only vendors or personal
> blogs who have made a choice to experimentally support Atom; I mean
> those that are pushing Atom to an audience who doesn't understand what
> the issues are.

Yes, from a syndication format I've found it HIGHLY premature for use of Atom.
It's a great thing and when it's offered in parallel with mature standards like
RSS-1.0 it's a great thing.  But to offer it as the SOLE syndication format /at
this time/ is a less-than-idea situation.  This implies nothing about any one
format being any better or worse than another.

Now, if the choice is 'atom or nothing' then I'm certainly willing to support
use of it.  I'd rightly complain about the surge of naive developers we'll have
to put up with as legacy nightmares because of it.  This, however, is
considerably less worse than putting up with feeding that nitwit ego sure to
crow about RSS...

I'm not sure how I'd feel about it from a client/server editing perspective.
There are some disjoint issues between what the hosting environments "need" and
what some folks are insisting upon grafting into atom.  This is, perhaps, a much
stickier issue but one that might easily be resolved by establishing compliance
profiles with perhaps some timeframe expectations.

-Bill Kearney
Syndic8.com