Chances are, most of you have better things to worry about than the RSS "specification," which comes in at least three main, sometimes incompatible, flavors. Still, RSS is breaking out of its Weblog roots to become a quick and easy way to distribute small bits of otherwise relatively unformatted data (for example, we and three other IDG publications now use it to share headlines, which automatically populate a spot on our respective home pages).
So I, at least, have been interested in following new work to chuck all the previous flavors (and political harrumphing; also see this) and develop a new standard. It's aimed initially at Weblogs, specifically, to create an API for posting items to them, but unless it becomes horribly convoluted, it could also find wide application in other contexts:
"The EchoProject is an initative to develop a common syntax for syndication, archiving and an editing API. ... Echo will be vendor neutral, implemented by everybody, freely extensible by anybody, and cleanly and thoroughly specified. For all of our work we will release clear specifications describing it in detail, build tools to test conformance and interoperability, and get it implemented in all the popular tools."
Sam Ruby of IBM is now heading up the effort fulltime, and using a wiki to as a tool for achieving consensus (for example, on a name for the spec: the consensus settled Echo - although that is also the name of a Java framework Sun released earlier this month.
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