I am worried that the next-gen syndication process rooted in Sam’s Wiki is in danger of going seriously off the rails, because some of the participants have got the idea that it’s about trying to invent new technology or improve RSS.
What the Echo-that-was project should be about is picking the stuff that’s already been proven to work and be interoperable, and writing it down in a clean, clear way, and arranging for the specification to be clearly out of the clutches of any vendor.
There is also scope for fixing current obvious problems, like relative URIs and the fuzziness about escaped markup and the fuzziness about guids and permalinks.
In the Wiki, people are flinging proposals for radical new capabilities against the wall, like content-by-reference, and multiple-URIs-per-author and so on and so on.
We need to crystallize and refine and clarify and write it down so that any literate human can write it and any competent programmmer can implement it and no commercial interests can hijack it. That’s all.
