For those of you who’ve been following the development of RSS even a little bit, you know how crazy it’s gotten out there.  It’s gotten to the point where an honest web developer doesn’t dare create the damned feed in the first place.  But fortunately, people much more influential in the Open Source community than myself are starting to put thier foot down and demand a sane and reliable RSS format:

threshold state: Conventional RSS

I posted earlier about various problems and ambiguities in the RSS 2.0 specification. Reaction to that post, and email discussion with some other developers, confirms conclusions I reached months ago: that no one is in a position to provide definitive answers. The RSS Board is either unwilling or unable to produce a clear and unambiguous spec, and, though there is no shortage of opinions on how various things might be resolved, there are no clear winners on which ones to choose.

So, in a (perhaps futile) attempt to resolve a few of the problems, here?s a draft interpretation of the RSS 2.0 spec, as I plan to implement it in Textpattern. It?s tentative and probably incomplete. This is not intended to duplicate or contradict the spec; any feed implementation that follows these proposals should be entirely valid according to the written specification.

I say Bravo and Here, Here! I’m redesigning the main portions of this website, and will soon need to implement a new RSS feed, which has thusfar been the least promising portion of the process ahead. If, however, the folks that make WordPress and TextPattern are going to agree on a standard interpretation of the RSS convention, then perhaps there is hope for me yet.