December 18^th, 2004

Everybody has a RSS feed now. The US department of state has RSS feeds on foreign policy, the CBC opens its news channels, podcasting is now being done by the BBC.

All this happens with RSS as the underlying format, XML as the underlying technology. No RDF in sight. I, hereby, declare RDF as a failed technology and while I never liked RDF anyway (and this announcement is like declaring the disintegration of the democratic party, pathetic bullshit), there's nevertheless a grain of truth to be found here.

In fact, there's also no ATOM in sight, because no one outside of the tech-geek-group cares for it.

XML is tough and RSS is even harder to do right. The underlying technology has obscure difficulties that create problems that cannot be reliably fixed in the layers and layers of abstraction we piled on top of it. But in a world where my university neglects to tell people what a character set is ("just don't use German Umlaute in C, they don't work" (that's stupid on so many levels, I have to laugh every time I think about it)), it's no wonder that even tech savvy people like Dave don't care if their technology works outside of North America. Unless we (computer scientists and especially information scientists) learn to create technology for all people, not just for the few who "speak Latin1", we don't even deserve the term "scientist", because, unfortunately, our experiments cannot be replicated outside of the western world.

That's the problem with the format wars. RSS works for everyone currently involved and when the first glitches with feeds from India show up ("Hey, has this feed just been updated, or not, I can't tell... is this a date???") it'll be much to late to fix anything about it. The world will move on regardless.