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is RSS following in the path of WAP?

no. it's not. at least not in my opinion. i keep seeing random posts about how the many different RSS standards and Atom ( like this one, nothing against this guy, everyone is entitled to their own opinion) will lead is leading it down the exact path to death that WAP followed.

the logic seems to be:

RSS has a lot of competing versions. WAP had a bunch of different competing versions. WAP died. Q.E.D. RSS will die.

that's not my opinion and here's why:

1) people seem to confuse WAP with it's original markup language, WML. WML did have X x Y x Z permutations where X is the manufacturer, Y is the version, and Z is the gateway. it was difficult, but people solved this problem, by creating frameworks to deal with it and using UAProfs. there were quite a few products that dealt (and still deal today) with this problem in an elegant manner. creating content was not the problem, and had nothing to do with the death of WAP, again in my opinion.

2) WAP died because of network latency/slow phone processors, which was the exact problem it was trying to solve. WAP was supposed to tokenize it's markup language, WML, and send a binary representation to the phones, thus reducing the work on the processor and reducing bandwidth by a factor of N, making it fast and usable. good theory, bad implementations. WAP was launched on phones using CSD which i think was still too slow to make these applications usable. people gave up, and WAP got a bad reputation. by the time GPRS came along, it was too late.

3) WAP died because of poor application design on small screens and keypad input. Too many people tried to just transcode existing 800x600 applications to fit onto a 60 x 30 screen. posting data was a nightmare, and people couldn't easily enter information using a keypad. the few applications at the time that were designed for this i think were usable, and perhaps somehwat useful, but they were the minority. again. bad rep.

4) WAP died because the mechanisms for push were ignored or weren't made available by the carriers. WAP push, which allowed an application developer to start a WAP session based on alerts or stimulus from a PC based system. only Nextel and Sprint PCS in the early days made this available to developers, but it was never implemented by commercial applications. SMS launching WAP browsers was first implemented on the Ericsson T68, again, after it was too late.

5) WAP died because superior solutions were coming to market. the experience of an XHTML browser, and the silver bullet that would be brought to market by iMode made developers, and more importantly, the enterprises that were getting no return on the investment they put into WAP/WML, to kill all the budget surrounding these applications. because the version 1 projects using WAP/WML were so dismal, combined with the bubble bursting, enterprises and finiancial institutions say "no way, quit it".

6) the divergence of WML was largely a time to market issue tied to hardware deployment cycles (development of phones had to precede deployment by 6-9 months) , the divergence of RSS/Atom is a personality conflict. the former was largely solved by a standards organization (WAP Forum/OMA) getting involved, the latter has yet to get there. there were valid reasons for the divergence of WML, beyond differences in syntax.

so, if you beleive my hypotheses above for why WAP died, if RSS dies, it won't be because of divergence, it will be for other reasons, like people just getting plain fed up with the immaturity surrounding the open syndication community, and glomming onto an open standard that a standards body creates, and syndication clients start to support.

after all, it's all about a publisher being able to reach the biggest number of readers. once microsoft says "Longhorn will support open syndication format X" guess which version publishers are going to start piping out?