>The worst use of the <BLINK> tag ever was the discussion held in the early days of RSS about escaping HTML in titles, whose attention-grabbing title went something like this: "Hey, what happens when you put a <BLINK> tag in the title???!!!"
>The content of that notorious discussion went on and off and on and off for weeks, giving all the netizens of the RSS community blogosphere terrible headaches, with people's entire blogs disappearing and reappearing every second, until it finally reached a flashing point, when Dave Winer humbly conceded that it wasn't the user's fault for being an idiot, and maybe just maybe there was tiny teeny little design flaw in RSS, and it wasn't actually such a great idea to allow HTML tags in RSS titles.
Also we have user-agents. Our userscripts (& amassed socialized, collective defenses they enable) should help provide us agency, to defend us against hijinx, to give us our own preferred view of systems. The web platform is uniquely able to handle these trivial little harassment cases, in ways far better than conventional software. This is just such a small-minded, speck-of-dust little concern to me, such a minor irrelevant point. Who cares how long & how stupid the thread on blink tag was, or how hyperbolic the lulz were at the time over it- this is easy to fix.
Podcasting not having a specification allows hollowed out soulless corporate ghouls to put any audio series they want online however they want & call it a podcast. Even a flawed, shitty specification at least defines some base idea, creates a general technical terrain that defines the idea. Podcasting got ripped the fuck off by monsters, because it had no specification. Technical cooperation is impossible without defined technical grounds.
Being serious: do you really think a lack of RFC killed RSS? If so, why not submit one now? I feel like RSS could make a serious comeback if given a chance, like built-in browser support for it.
