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Welcome to my corner of the web!

My name is Mihai and all I do is web development, be it server-side (PHP, mySQL and others) or client-side. I am mainly interested of Web standards and related technologies. I have good experience with Flash as well, but I no longer like it much.

I have contributed to various web standards-related mailing lists, with reviews and comments to web specifications like HTML5. Additionally, I also worked on several projects of my own.

I am an Opera browser user, but I work on the Firefox browser for Mozilla. I also like Webkit and KHTML. I am an Ubuntu Linux user - no dual-boot.

(Why) RSS is crap

29 July 2006, 10:34

Hello!

<rant>

I'll try to keep this blog post short: RSS is crap.

  1. RSS is not only one file format. RSS refers to multiple file formats which resemble each other.
  2. Thus, various RSS versions are incompatible.
  3. There are around 10 incompatible versions as of writing this. maybe I don't even know them all. By the time you read my post, there might be more.
  4. RSS 2.0 is good, it serves its purpose.
  5. RSS 2.0 is not crap.
  6. Same goes for any of the versions you pick.
  7. Problem is the entire RSS.
  8. Thus implementation is suddenly hard, for a supposedly simple format.

Recommended reading: The myth of RSS compatibility by Mark Pilgrim. Thanks to his post, I can implement better RSS support.

Solution: use Atom wisely:

  1. It's as easy as RSS 2.0, if you ignore all the other capabilities you don't need.
  2. It's better documented.
  3. It's easier to implement.
  4. It's not crap.

</rant>

Thanks :).

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