The Butt Ugly Weblog

Call for support on weblog standards

Aaron Swartz: As previously noted, weblog protocols are stuck in a rut. We want to work together and solve the problems, but political battles keep getting in the way. It’s time to put our differences aside and solve the problem.

I support the weblog format roadmap. Let’s start fresh, work together, and get the job done.

There is a wiki page for the road map.

Standards good. I'm all for this effort, and JSPWiki will support it.

I do fear that there will be plenty of infighting, though. I don't know whether weblogging software is mature enough so that we know what to standardize and what to leave alone; and the whole RSS debacle seems a bit laughable to me: We have three formats; one of which is dying rapidly and every reader supports the every format anyway. So I don't think it's not a problem that we have multiple formats around; it's just an aesthetic problem, not a practical one.

However, a good, standardized and extensible SOAP (I've pretty much given up on XML-RPC due to all of its problems, such as the ASCII/UTF-8 mess) API for the most common weblog functionalities would be very cool.