A noteworthy thread with Dave Winer in response to my O'Reilly weblog post on XML-RPC as the basis of Weblog APIs. Dave starts by writing:
To Timothy, dive in a little deeper into the MetaWeblog API. It is based on RSS 2.0. It's exactly what you want. Or put it another way, what more do you want?
As I state in my post: international character support, robust extensibility and cohesion with RSS. The MetaWeblog API was released about 5 months before RSS 2.0, but I look past that factual error and reply:
I would begin with the first point in my post – international character support. How would you provide it in a frozen specification that explicitly states strings to be ASCII?
Dave replies:
Read the archive of the XML-RPC mail list. This issue comes up regularly. I get tired of doing repeat performances. XML-RPC is so deployed it just can't be changed, not by anyone. If you do a little digging you'll see how other smart people have dealt with this issue. I've given my opinion more than once.
I'm aware of these workarounds. As I've noted there are a number of different solutions including breaking from the specification to support UTF8. I would be curious to hear what users working with languages that don't fit into ASCII think.
There are different degrees of smart. Smart workarounds. Yes. Smart implementation of international character support. No.
When Dave says, XML-RPC is so deployed it just can't be changed, not by anyone
which gets to the heart of my point. If XML-RPC cannot be evolved then indeed it is not the right thing for a publishing API to go forward with.
Update: Dave is turning up the volume and stumping through his Harvard weblog which Shelley Powers comments on.
<p>A noteworthy thread with Dave Winer in response to <a href="http://www.oreillynet.com/cs/user/view/wlg/3229">my O'Reilly weblog post</a> on XML-RPC as the basis of Weblog APIs. Dave <a href="http://www.oreillynet.com/cs/user/view/cs_msg/19223">starts</a> by writing:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>To Timothy, dive in a little deeper into the MetaWeblog API. It is based on RSS 2.0. It's exactly what you want. Or put it another way, what more do you want?</p>
</blockquote>
<p>As I state in my post: international character support, robust extensibility and cohesion with RSS. The MetaWeblog API was released about 5 months <strong>before</strong> RSS 2.0, but I look past that factual error and <a href="http://www.oreillynet.com/cs/user/view/cs_msg/19224">reply</a>:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>I would begin with the first point in my post – international character support. How would you provide it in a frozen specification that explicitly states strings to be ASCII?</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Dave <a href="http://www.oreillynet.com/cs/user/view/cs_msg/19270">replies</a>:<br />Read the archive of the XML-RPC mail list. This issue comes up regularly. I get tired of doing repeat performances. XML-RPC is so deployed it just can't be changed, not by anyone. If you do a little digging you'll see how other smart people have dealt with this issue. I've given my opinion more than once.</p>
<p>I'm aware of these workarounds. As I've noted there are a number of different solutions including breaking from the specification to support UTF8. I would be curious to hear what users working with languages that don't fit into ASCII think.</p>
<p>There are different degrees of smart. Smart workarounds. Yes. Smart implementation of international character support. No.</p>
<p>When Dave says, <q>XML-RPC is so deployed it just can't be changed, not by anyone</q> which gets to the heart of my point. If XML-RPC cannot be evolved then indeed it is not the right thing for a publishing API to go forward with.</p>
<p><strong>Update</strong>: Dave is turning up the volume and stumping through his Harvard weblog which <a href="http://weblog.burningbird.net/fires/001246.htm">Shelley Powers comments</a> on.</p>
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