Tue, 24 Sep 2002
Dave Winer's RSS breaks Amphetadesk
I have been subscribed to scripting news for a while when I came across this tonight in amphetadesk:
There was an error parsing this channel. The parser reported: not well-formed (invalid token) at line 81, column 166, byte 6860 . You may wish to contact the owner of this channel informing them of this XML parsing error, but AmphetaDesk will keep trying to get new updates for you.
It seems dave has seen fit to just convert http://scripting.com/rss.xml to RSS 2.0. Think about it. This is tantamount to converting your website to spit out HTML 4.0 when user agents are still at 2.0. Couldn't he just have spun another file called rss2.xml ensuring continued success for readers of rss.xml? I don't get it.
operator: this is amphetadesk how may I help you?
me: please delete dave winer's horked up RSS.
operator: consider it done.
Update: Dave comments that he has discovered and fixed the problem in the feed and it was not related to RSS 2.0. If you're in the mood for a classic Winer flame war, follow the comments link.
Update: Mark Pilgrim picks up the story of how people are abandoning RSS. I think that's a bit extreme; however, I am in the camp that believes staying at 0.91 is probably the most prudent thing to do at this point. But I can understand the backlash given Dave's ambassadorship.
Posted at: 22:42 | permalink
