Re: Shipping Atom products prematurely

[luke@xxxxxxxxxxxx]

Quoting Dare Obasanjo <kpako@xxxxxxxxx>:
> This boiler plate is meaningless. Why would a regular
> aggregator user see it or even care?

Agreed.

> 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 wasn't a big fan of Google's decision either, as like you said, it essentially
forced aggregator authors to implement a spec that was not yet finalized. And
once more aggregators started supporting it, more sites in turn have started
publishing Atom 0.3 feeds. This has gotten us to a point where when a new
version of Atom is published, there will still remain many published feeds out
there that still use the old (incompatible) spec., meaning
aggregators will need to continue to support these out-of-date Atom specs.

There is a certain individual who shall remain nameless who loves to blog about
the many incompatibilities between RSS versions. The widespread current
adoption of Atom 0.3 pretty much guarantees it will end up the same way. It may
even be worse because while new versions of RSS have given SOME thought to
backward compatibility (even if that compatibility wasn't perfect), Atom won't
as the previous spec was not final anyway.

> 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?

The users will be fine. Aggregator authors will just be forced to implement
Atom 1.0. Unfortunately, as stated above, Atom 0.3 (and 0.4, 0.5 or any other
intermediate versions there may be) will still need to be supported as well.

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

It won't. Aggregator authors should already be well aware of this stuff. It's
feed publishers that should be reminded somehow to upgrade to the latest Atom
spec when this is released. While this issue could theoretically be forced if
all aggregator authors were to agree to stop supporting Atom 0.3, I seriously
doubt this will happen. It's a prisoner's dilemma - if we all agree to do it,
we'd all be better off eventually. If a few continue to support 0.3 though,
they'd have an edge which would allow them more users at the expense of the
conforming aggregators, which would force those to reactivate 0.3 support. This
in turn means there will be little incentive for anyone to upgrade their then
outdated 0.3 feed to the latest release.

I'd welcome any suggestions on how to solve this problem - quite frankly, I'm
not sure there is a solution though... unless there's some legal mumbo jumbo
that could be put in the final spec that required any product that uses the
Atom 1.0 spec stop supporting any previous versions (beyond that which come
automatically due to backwards compatibility of course) after a certain date.
I'm no lawyer so I have no idea if this would be possible, but even if it is,
the open nature of Atom doesn't seem to mix too well with these kinds of
restrictions...