Tiptoe through the minefield...

Sam Ruby wrote:
> I predict that some day in the future you will look back on this past
> week as the time when option 2 (or 4) could have been picked but wasn't.
> Because one person who actually understands namespaces very well
> wasn't told of the namespace in the spec, and instead of making a simple
> fix to the spec, a (dare I say it) overreaction was made. This despite
> the fact that no other people have been identified as having a problem
> with this.

Actually, Sjoerd's XSLT transform broke [1] the moment Dave put in his
namespace, back on the 10th. Probably should have been a hint to us, but it
went right over my head, anyway. And Fredrik Lundh had to rewrite his
aggregator [2] (and will again, unless the namespace goes back in the spec),
which probably wasn't a big problem since he was developing it at the time.
Who knows how many other people have the same problem, but didn't notice (I
often subscribe to dead feeds for weeks or months without realizing it,
since aggregators aren't built to let me know, yet), or haven't yet been
bitten (since not quite everyone subscribes to Scripting News)?

My problem with option 4 (which I may or may not have posted in one of the
dozens of threads) was that a "well-written" non-namespace aware parser
wouldn't ever see the version number, since it wouldn't think that <rss:rss
version="2.0"> or <ministryofsillywalks:rss version="2.0"> had anything to
do with it. So you would have to mandate that rss be in the default
namespace, and you would still have to rewrite everything, to check for the
version number, and at that point you might just as well rewrite everything
to be namespace aware.

> P.S. Here's a thought: ask Olividu Predescu (the one who was broken),
> which option HE would prefer.

Better ask Brent instead. Looks like after Ovidiu fixed his XSLT (six days
later: it's just code ;), he decided to switch to NetNewsWire Lite. Does it
come with crack, or what? Yesterday I got very nearly twice as many hits
from it as from all other aggregators that set referrers combined (of
course, since I post double encoded code all the time, Radio users hate me,
but still...).

Phil Ringnalda

[1] http://w3future.com/weblog/2002/09/10.html
[2] http://effbot.org/zone/effnews-4.htm