So, AtomPub is a failure and RSS is dead. Anyone want to guess what my conference presentation next week is about?

Reports indicate that as a social phenomenon, email is dying out. As a technical phenomenon, spam is killing it. So what's an old codger to do?

I'm as excited as the next web developer about the whiz-bang, AJAX, JavaScript magic of web 2.0 interfaces, but let's not forget that there's still value in designing workable interfaces for less powerful browsers.

My plan to remove RSS feeds caused some consternation in the community. In addition to pointing out some places where RSS is still needed, a workaround was proposed. So, before I pull the plug, let's see if the workaround will…work. [Update: no, it won't.]

This is your two week warning: when I return from vacation, the RSS feeds are going to go away.

This evening I installed some new code for handling comments. The significant new features are the ability to put HTML elements (a few of them, anyway) in your comments and the ability to subscribe to the comments on a particular essay.

When I first starting putting this site together, I constructed a page that contained my “blogroll”. That page quickly became stale and I gave up. A few days ago, the Bloglines tip drifted past that showed me how to put the blogroll back, so here it is. Make of it what you will.

The world hardly needs me to point to something that Tim already has, but that doesn’t mean I can resist

Mark caught me serving broken XHTML. I wish my browser had done me that favor.

While it’s true that a number of the political factors that influenced the draconian, anti-Postel’s Law design of XML have gone away, I still think that design is virtuous and correct.

I challenged the escaped markup crowd to build a feed. No one did. Did no one notice, or did no one care? Or maybe no one succeeded?

I've argued against escaped markup in several forums: time to stop for a while. Either I've made my points or I haven't, repeating myself won't help. But since a number of people have suggested that I'm not proposing any solutions: here are some solutions. And a challenge; or at least an exercise that I think might be interesting.

No one has produced a single argument that even begins to persuade me to accept escaped markup.

I've been following the Echo Project as best I can. Conceptually, it seems like a good idea: the current state of affairs with respect to RSS is pretty messy and this effort would give us a fresh start. I've already voiced support for the idea. But I'm really startled to see how complex things have gotten.

Standardization is a good thing. Most of my day job wouldn't make a lot of sense if I didn't believe that. We've reached a point where it should be possible to achieve consensus about what's required to identify an item and what sorts of extensions should be easily achievable. I'll support whatever the community adopts.

Sam Ruby started a discussion about the essential characteristics of a web log entry. Herewith a few thoughts of my own.

On RSS, RDF, and making the former an instance of the latter.

If imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, then the trick is figuring out who to flatter, right?