Dancing About Architecture

There is a very useful RSS extension that I've been using on this site for a long time that allows a "feed of comments" to be associated with each entry in a feed. I've been calling these "microfeeds", and the extension that allows this to happen is called the Well-Formed Web namespace elements. There are all sorts of cool things you can do with this element, including using FeedBurner's Comment Count FeedFlare, and this element has made it into the default WordPress templates.

So, what's the problem? The person who maintains the landing page for the namespace URI at http://wellformedweb.org/CommentAPI/ changed the element name from CommentRSS to CommentRss without really telling anyone ... and didn't change the date of the page from 2003-10-10! It's like the history eraser button. This is lame. Here's the reasoning behind the change from Joe Gregorio on the feedvalidator mailing list:

I changed the Well-Formed Web site after it was pointed
out to me that it disagreed with Chris Sell's Specification,
after all he is the author of the spec. I would have made a
bigger deal of it had I realized how many implementations
of commentRss there were.

Ack! Every time I've run into this element it has always been capital RSS ... because that's what the namespace's URI landing page said. Sure, that's not binding, but now this is really becoming a problem for publishers that want to validate their feeds ... and now all downstream consumers of feeds are realistically going to have to look for both variations. We've had to change our FeedFlare to look for both variations, for example.

So, for those following along at home, that is *not* the way to care for a namespace.