I’m a pretty patient guy, but having worked extensively on the three major platforms (Windoze, Apple, *nix) with a number of authoring languages (ASP, JSP, PHP…) and types of Web authoring tools (Perl, XML/RSS…), I can safely say that it’s a wonder I have any hair left.

Perhaps it’s good in the “job security” way that things are still not as transparent as they should be, but it’s tough to launch anything out there.

As my last entry noted, I finally whacked together an RSS feed. (When am I going to switch to either MoveableType or roll my own blogging tool [I have on in PHP running locally]?!?)

Fine. It works. Haven’t set the cron for it yet, but whatever. (Update: Set the cron.)

But it just is so frustrating to roll RSS out.

Nomenclature: Some call their files “[whatever].xml”, some “[whatever].rss”, some “[whatever].rdf”.

How can aggregators easily find these puppies? Must make them tear their hair out. And is there going to be a standard in the near future? I.e. all RSS feeds must be “[whatever].rss”?? Let’s decide now so there is no need for backward compatability in the tools that are currently coming out, and so authors (me) can avoid renaming/recoding. Makes sense to me…

And the whole RSS vs. RDF battle, the namespace nuttiness…

And on one of my (hosted) domains, I had to create a MIME type in the .htaccess file (show of hands – how many NT types even know what the heck a .htaccess file is? Hell, in Linux it’s now in magic.conf or httpd.conf – there is no .htaccess per se). Could I easily find the right type to set?

NOoooooooooooooooo….

I took the one from my Linux box; didn’t work. Googled a bit, found the application-type MIME setting; still didn’t work.

Oh, I have to rip out the encoding type from the XML header. (That was just a guess that worked) Then it worked (in IE; barfed in Netscape..)

Bleh.

Bottom line: The file was built fine; it validates and all that, but it behaves differently in different client-server combos.

This is never a good thing.

But the RSS feed is for aggregators, not for eyeballing in a browser window, so I should stop my whining, right?

Actually not: What about doing a site JUST with XML, with included XLS file? Will there be browser issues there? If so, this is a deal-breaker…

Ah well, for all the XML buzz that’s been generated over the last, what, four years, XML is still very much in its infancy. And in many ways, RSS is the first widely deployed XML tool. You’re seeing that little orange XML button all over the place (shouldn’t it really be RSS? Marked up in XML, but to the RSS spec[s]…).

As long as things are moving forward…