As if RSS 0.9, 0.91, 0.92, 1.0, and 2.0 weren't enough to deal with, now there's RSS 1.1. I think the authors are missing the forest for the trees here. While there are some small improvements in RSS 1.1 relative to RSS 1.0 (which is a completely different beast than RSS 0.9x and RSS 2.0), they are simply not outweighed by the cost of expanding market confusion and incompatibility. Oh well, maybe if we're lucky, this will be the straw that breaks the camel's back, and convinces the world to just move forwad to ATOM leaving RSS in the dustbin of history where it belongs. (Hmm, three tired cliches in one paragraph. Is that a personal record? Guess I'm just not feeling very creative this morning.)
Google has proposed using a rel="nofollow" attribute on a elements in comments and trackbacks to prevent comment spam.
At first I thought this was a very neat idea (after checking the HTML spec to see that this is indeed a valid HTML attribute, of course). On further reflection, I'm not so sure. It makes sense for trackbacks, which really aren't that relevant. However, legitimate, non-spam links in comments should not be penalized. I'm afraid blog and comment systems will simply start putting
rel="nofollow" on all links, which is a tad too aggresive for my tastes. Perhaps we could allow this to be configured on a per-user basis by the site maintainer?
Longer term, I'd really like the search engines to be smart enough to figure out what's link spam and what isn't. If Bayesian annalysis works for e-mail spam it should work for comment spam too, especially since all the search engine really has to do is notice the relatively small percent of sites that attract a disproportionate number of links from comments and trackbacks.
SyncroSoft has released version 5.1 of the <Oxygen/> XML editor. Oxygen supports XML, XSL, DTDs, XQuery, SVG, and the W3C XML Schema Language. New features in version 5.1 include code folding, code templates, improved Relax NG support, Schematron validation, and the ability to use MSXML and XSLTProc as XSLT transformers. It costs $128 with support. Upgrades from pre 5.0 versions are $76. Upgrades from m5.0 are free.