Ryan Tomayko

An article from Slashdot on how Google might support RSS over or in addition to the more recent Atom syndication format.

The comments on this article are amazing. First, it is enlightening to see a majority of “technical” people having little understanding about the various standardization processes or why multiple bodies even exist. This is slashdot so “not understanding” takes the form of people asserting inaccurate statements as fact instead of asking questions of course.

Ignorance aside, there are some beautiful examples of the types of things I want to speak to. For example, this is a really good question:

Why did atom even come into existence? Was not RSS already established, or is there some kind of deficiency in RSS that I'm missing here?

And here is a commonly held response:

If we didn't keep reinventing the wheel then society would be plagued with unemployed wheel inventors with nothing to keep them busy. It would be a nightmare.

What I'd like to get at here is that what we are seeing with RSS/Atom is evolution not reinvention. RSS/Atom is such a great example of what I would like to explore because it shows the ugliness that must occur in the evolution of popular data formats and the systems that use them. These things should start extremely primitive and specific and be thrown out there so that they can be tested for whether they have value at all. Once some critical value level is reached, you need to formalize a little bit. And then do it a little bit more. And then you eventually reach a point where you have a decent idea of what the problem domain is and you go back and attack with a clean slate (Atom).

So it seems an overall point I would like to make is that we need to be looking for patterns that tell us when to move to the next stage in the evolution of a format or system and instead of attacking those that recognize these patterns, embrace them and their ideas and move ahead. The first wheels were probably square, or maybe there were all shapes of wheels being developed in different places for different things. And then people using square wheels got a chance to see people using triangle wheels, and people using triangle wheels saw people using round wheels. Then they all started talking and the square wheel guys had the right material and the triangle wheel guys had the right ratios and the round wheel guys had the right shape. So they decided to agree on how wheels might share some things in common and from this comes the best of breed wheels we have today. But if people weren't out there “reinventing” the wheel, they might still be square. And if the square wheel guys had to wait for a standards body before they created there primitive and shitty wheels, we might not have wheels at all.