Close, but no cigar.

It's not that I want it to remain ambiguous, it *has* to remain
ambiguous, because the roadmap says so.

It takes the decision out of everyone's hands, no one can change the
spec, because the SPEC SAYS IT CAN'T BE CHANGED.

That's been the key to the growth of the format, guys. If it could
have been broken, the format would be nothing.

Dave


--- In rss-public@yahoogroups.com, "James Holderness" <j4_james@...>
wrote:
>
> 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 â€" 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
>