Re: Shipping Atom products prematurely

[Dare Obasanjo <kpako@xxxxxxxxx>]

--- Dan Brickley <danbri@xxxxxx> wrote:
>  
> Yup. For sites *producing* Atom feeds, perhaps
> encourage a bit of
> boilerplate at the top of the file in XML comments,
> perhaps something
> like:
> 
> <!--  Early Adoption Warning
> This document uses an in-progress draft of the Atom
> publishing
> format. Atom is undergoing active development and
> standardization 
> within the IETF, see
>
http://www.ietf.org/html.charters/atompub-charter.html
> Please note that the AtomPub WG will not allow
> deployment of early 
> implementation of draft proposals to hinder
> improvements to the Atom
> design. Implementor feedback is welcomed by the WG,
> however implementors 
> should be cautious when deploying prototype Atom
> software to end-users. -->

This boiler plate is meaningless. Why would a regular
aggregator user see it or even care? 

Once Google made Atom 0.3 the only format supported by
certain Blogger sites aggregator authors were
pressured to implement a interim version of the draft
spec. There are now literally thousands of desktop
aggregators that support Atom 0.3 on users desktops.
I've counted aboyut 50,000 downloads of RSS Bandit
versions wioth Atom 0.3 support. Both FeedDemon and
SharpReader are more popular so it isn't inconceivable
for there to be 100,000 - 200,000 users out there who
are dependent on major sityes providing Atom 0.3
feeds. This number is growing by tens of thousands of
users a month. 

What the heck is going to happen once Atom 1.0 comes
out. Will all these users be out of luck or will
Google/Blogger continue supporting Atom 0.3
indefinitely? What happens when even more sites follow
Google's lead? 

Finally, how the does putting some comments in an XML
file actually help this problem? 



=====
THINGS TO DO IF I BECOME AN EVIL OVERLORD #25
No matter how well it would perform, I will never construct any sort of machinery which is completely indestructible except for one small and virtually inaccessible vulnerable spot.


		
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