So Dave Winer has decided to take his ball and go home,
So I’m shutting down Scripting News now, to give me some time to think, and to give you all a demo of what it would be like if it weren’t here. These last few days have been really awful. You can’t imagine what it’s like to have so many people screaming at you. It’s inhuman, especially considering that my health isn’t that good. The only conclusion I can come to is that I shouldn’t be doing this.
This is a classic case of can dish it out but can’t take it. The latest round of “we can’t work with Winer,” of course, came about after he started sniping at Userland competitors because they produced “funky” RSS feeds. Of course the feeds were completely compliant with the RSS 2.0 spec and passed fine through RSS validation tools that Winer himself had praised, but as several folks noted, they failed to pass through the ultimate RSS 2.0 validator, Winer himself.
Winer, of course, refused to say explicitly why these feeds were “funky” preferring to simply continue to throw out vague accusations — and then it turned out he was upset because Movable Type and others were daring to use namespaces, which are part of the RSS 2.0 spec, to accomplish useful things within RSS (such as routing around Userland’s habit of wanting to display the e-mail address of authors).
So Winer throws out all of these bombs toward his competitors, and then when people push back he again does the “how can people be so mean when I’m in such poor health” and walks away.