And once again: RSS funkynezz

Ok, for all of those who are now a bit twisted inside the funky-or-not-funky-discussion of Feeds, Dave Winer brings on his RSS 2.0 Political FAQ, giving his opinion away for free. This time it’s well formulated and makes some points, really:

A feed is funky if it uses extensions to provide information that can be expressed by core elements. If everyone strives to not be funky, then it becomes trivially easy to write aggregators, and new entrants to the market can get in quickly and at low cost, and users get more choice. If we were to go the opposite way, with every source of feeds inventing their own replacements for core RSS 2.0 elements, the cost to enter would become increasingly high, and it becomes more likely that programs will express compatibility in terms of products, not formats. Then you’d have to use one aggregator to read BBC feeds, for example, and another to read SF Chronicle feeds. So “funky” is anti-interop; and “not funky” is pro-interop.

I’ve changed from “watching the case with interest” to “watching the case”.