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Netscape Restores RSS DTD, Until July
Posted by
CmdrTaco
on Wed Jan 17, 2007 10:25 AM
from the that's-kinda-lame dept.
from the that's-kinda-lame dept.
Randall Bennett writes "RSS 0.91's DTD has been restored to it's rightful location on my.netscape.com, but it'll only stay there till July 1st, 2007. Then, Netscape will remove the DTD, which is loaded four million times each day. Devs, start your caching engines."
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Ask Slashdot: Is Dedicated Hosting for Critical DTDs Necessary? 140 comments
pcause asks: "Recently there was a glitch, when someone at Netscape took down a page that had an important DTD (for RSS), used by many applications and services. This got me thinking that many or all of the important DTDs that software and commerce depend on are hosted at various commercial entities. Is this a sane way to build an XML based Internet infrastructure? Companies come and go all of the time; this means that the storage and availability of those DTDs is in constant jeopardy. It strikes me that we need an infrastructure akin to the root server structure to hold the key DTDs that are used throughout the industry. What organization would be the likely custodian of such data, and what would be the best way to insure such an infrastructure stays funded?"
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Netscape Restores RSS DTD, Until July
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Redirect (Score:3, Insightful)
(http://www.thinkoutside.org/)
Re:Redirect (Score:4, Funny)
(http://home.primus.ca/~ronsharp/tororg.html)
Re:Redirect (Score:5, Insightful)
(http://werewolf.darkicon.com/)
And any dev who codes his app to check a file like this every day instead of caching it client-side should be smacked oh-my-god-so-frickin-hard.
Re:Redirect (Score:5, Funny)
(http://home.primus.ca/~ronsharp/tororg.html)
Re:URIs (Score:5, Informative)
(http://www.faqs.org/rfcs/rfc3675.html)
Not enough time!!!! (Score:5, Funny)
(This is not a troll. Resignation and bitterness, maybe. But not a troll.)
Re:Not enough time!!!! (Score:5, Funny)
Why can't we just move it? (Score:4, Interesting)
URLs, URIs and URNs 101 (Score:5, Informative)
(http://www.pobox.com/~meta/ | Last Journal: Sunday February 29 2004, @09:19AM)
For example, globally unique IDs in Atom feeds are often URNs, and hence URIs; but URNs aren't URLs, and you shouldn't need or want to try to connect to something just because it's used as a globally unique identifier in an Atom feed and looks a bit like a URL.
This is relevant because many Internet specifications use URNs (or in the case of HTML, FPIs) as spec identifiers. For instance, XML namespace identifiers are URIs; and while some of them happen to be URLs too, the XML namespace recommendation [w3.org] says:
In the case of RSS 0.91, Netscape wrote the spec, and they used a URL and told people to connect to it to fetch the necessary information to parse the file. They could have used a URN, but I'm guessing they wanted to keep their options open as far as changing the spec on the fly.
(Of course, Dave Winer has a different approach to changing RSS specs on the fly...)
CmdrTaco (Score:5, Funny)
Two Stargate SG1 Films Announced - from the good-for-them dept.
Linux: x86 Linux Flash Player 9 is Final - from the i-still-hate-flash dept.
Looks like somebody is having a case of the mondays.
(On Wednesday.)
Re:CmdrTaco (Score:5, Funny)
I don't get it (Score:5, Interesting)
Re: Because software evolves by mutation (Score:5, Insightful)
(Last Journal: Wednesday October 31, @08:33AM)
Richard Dawkins asks this very fundamental question, why reproduce (sexually or asexually) using seeds and embryos? Why not propagate by cuttings and cloning? It happens in nature. Many fern like plants do it. Bananas have been reproducing by new shoots. Then he discusses how harmful mutations too propagage and how going back to the basics and recreating the embryo selects the beneficial mutations and puts a check on deletrious mutations. Books The Selfish Gene, Climbing the Mount Improbable.
Re:I don't get it (Score:5, Informative)
(http://jasonrumney.net/)
Developers use off the shelf XML parsers, which generally take care of validation for you. Netscape created this problem themselves when they stated in the spec for RSS 0.91 that well-formedness was not enough, RSS 0.91 feeds should be validated against the DTD. They then specified that document authors must use a PUBLIC doctype specifier, so the option of using a SYSTEM one (where the DTD is looked up in a local catalog) is not an option.
mirror ;) (Score:3, Funny)
(http://puck.nether.net/~jared/)
Re:mirror ;) (Score:5, Informative)
(http://www.geoffreyspear.com/)
Re:mirror ;) (Score:5, Funny)
(http://www.aquadan.com/ | Last Journal: Monday May 15 2006, @09:21PM)
But you waited until (UID 633928) to register on Slashdot?
Newbie.
Let's be Evil (Score:2, Interesting)
"Caching" not the answer (Score:5, Informative)
The proper thing to do is for your application to use an XML catalog for resolving entities/URIs and bundle the DTD files with the application. There is a good article at http://xml.apache.org/commons/components/resolver
Technical vs. Emotional (Score:5, Interesting)
(I tried posting this as a reply to the blog posting, but I'm not getting the confirmation email, so I'll post it here)
From a purely technical standpoint, I agree with your assertion that, for well-baked files like RSS DTDs, clients should not be relying on a file hosted by an arbitrary service.
That being said, please understand that the emotional message you're sending is: "Don't rely on Netscape".
Why?
Back when RSS was first starting out, Netscape's documentation said to use Netscape URLs for the RSS DTDs. Witness this page [archive.org], published by Netscape, from late 2000:
Now, a shade over six years later, Netscape is saying "Oh, yeah, what we told you to do? Never mind. We're not supporting it any more."
If Netscape/AOL was shutting its doors, that'd be one thing. If the service in question was obviously onerous, that too would be understandable. Or, if Netscape told people "For the love of all that is holy, don't use our URLs for your DTD needs!" from the get-go (based on that document, you didn't), any such reliance would be our own fault.
But, because AOL does not want to serve up two static files, each of which is smaller than the "Netscape Reports" graphic on the netscape.com home page, Netscape is abandoning a service they told people to use.
So what are we to think about Netscape's current services and their long-term usability?
dumb (Score:1, Funny)
Yeah, feed readers don't need the internet at all! What WERE you guys thinking?
Why is it done this way? (Score:2)
Well you know what this means (Score:2)
(Last Journal: Wednesday January 31 2007, @02:25AM)
Better than alternative (Score:1, Insightful)
First woodpecker... (Score:3, Insightful)
(http://www.dadhacker.com/)
Oh, right. Nobody, really. It's amazing it works at all (... and sometimes it doesn't!)
Djikstra's quip, "If programmers build houses they way they built programs, the first woodpecker to come along would topple civilization" was and remains insightful.
Content based addressing (Score:2)
(http://www.omnifarious.org/~hopper/ | Last Journal: Tuesday October 02, @12:21PM)
The web needs some scheme for content based addressing. Like the urn:sha1 scheme used in gnutella. This (and some sort of reasonable caching scheme) would do a lot to alleviate problems like this. It could also help a lot with the Slashdot effect.
Against the idea of the web? (Score:1)
(http://blog.bluenodes.com/)
Never depend on Netscape (AOL) (Score:2)
So where should it go? (Score:1)
(http://www.animats.com)
Don't get it from archive.org. The Internet Archive isn't really set up to have a huge number of quick retrievals of the same tiny item. There's no front-end cache farm, and response will be slow. (This was a problem after they started archiving Greatful Dead fan recordings. The Deadheads, many of whom did too many drugs in the 1960s, would stream the same audio, over and over and over. The music archive had to be moved to a completely different system.)
Try to get this hosted by "w3c.org", which hosts other DTDs and seems to do a good job.
whoops (Score:1)
(http://freedomsforums.com/)
Cant they sue Microsoft for stealing bandwidth, and bad design?
Re:whoops (Score:5, Funny)
(http://www.hyperlogos.org/ | Last Journal: Wednesday July 18, @08:19PM)
Uh, if Microsoft could be held liable for bad design, their buildings would already have been burned to the ground, their women stampeded, their cattle raped, the ground sown with salt and the wells poisoned.
Re:hmm (Score:1)
(http://freedomsforums.com/)
They're still in business, aren't they?
I know, i was trying to be funny.....hey so where you.
Probably (Score:2, Funny)
Re:I hate grammer nazis (Score:2)
Re:Spelling issue (Score:3, Informative)
(http://www.jasonkchapman.com/)
An old Jedi mind trick:
Its apostrophe is missing, because it's been moved over here.
Re:Its (Score:1, Informative)
I think you should subscribe to this newsgroup [google.com].
Re:OR (Score:1)
What you said is wrong, and what you meant is trivial. Grammar is a product of the human brain, almost all learned unconsciously. I'm sure anyone here who's looked at AI language can attest that the important parts of grammar do not boil down to simple rules that are taught in school, or indeed could possibly be taught in school. Anyone who's used state-of-the-art translators like Google's should be able to infer that too. If everyone started talking like hicks (or some other low-class group) tomorrow, we'd all be able to understand each other perfectly. The only "grammar" that would cease to exist would be the frequently bizarre and definitely unnecessary rules by up by a handful of generations of prescriptivists starting in the 1800s, and frankly, I think we could do without that kind of grammar.
None of that is to say that it doesn't annoy me when people don't put in the effort to use standard spellings, or even that I don't think that people should be corrected on points of grammar (because being able to speak and write in high-prestige standard dialects is a socially useful tool whether I like it or not). But to say that the sky will fall if people don't correct each other's grammar, or that speakers of nonstandard dialects are "wrong", is absurd.
Incidentally, I would highly recommend The Language Instinct by Steven Pinker. Very compelling book.