Danny Ayers on Simple Sharing Extensions

He's not impressed

Most everything else I find very disappointing, on many levels. I really don’t know where to start.

Ok, start with the use of fairly arbitrary strings as identifiers. The Web has a well-defined system for identifiers, the URI. They’ve also got dates in RFC 822 format here - when did these folks last check any of the standard specs? They’re using RSS 2.0 and OPML as container formats. Marvellous choice, they’re inherently uinteroperable because they don’t have their own namespaces. Party like it’s 1999.

I suppose what really irritates me most here is that they’ve also egregiously ignored the recent progress on syndication data modelling/exchange protocol around Atom. I know you shouldn’t put down to malice what you can explain with ignorance, but I can only imagine this is politically motivated. Microsoft are less likely to get community resistance to “embracing and extending” Dave Winer’s Own Syndication Stack than something community based.

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PS. Mr.Winer, as you might expect, is gushing.