A. Pagaltzis wrote:
> Dave Winer insists that his interpretation of the spec is only
> one of multiple valid ones. Which seems to mean that the spec
> effectively provides no guidance and anyone should make up their
> own mind. So I tried to formulate something that gives guidance
> without removing this ambiguity which Dave seems to consider very
> important – clarification, not change.

I tend to agree. I wish he would just come out and state it unequivocally,
but reading between the lines, it seems to me that Dave wants the spec to
remain ambiguous if that's how it has always been. Any clarification that
made it unambiguous would be considered a change to someone. He's trying to
avoid having to tell all these companies that have invested "billions of
dollars" in RSS that their products are now broken as a result of a
clarification in the spec.

Take Microsoft for example. Their IE7 aggregator treats titles as plain
text. Angle brackets and ampersands are just WYSIWYG - there's no markup
interpretation going on. However, their blogs at MSDN treat titles as
escaped HTML. They double escape ampersands and angle brackets to prevent
them being interpreted as markup. Any clarification in the spec that
unambiguously stated how titles were supposed to be interpreted would break
one of these two products.

Of course we're now left with the situation in which we have two RSS
products, produced by the same company, that won't actually interoperate
with each other. But at least they can both still claim to be valid
interpretations of the spec. Everyone's right. Nothing really works. But's
it's all cool.

Regards
James