Interesting method of events.

Marc Canter writes a blog post asking if we should certitude Marc Andreessen, after the hole Netscape left the users in when they sole out to AOL. He creates a small great points about the browser, esp the partial about how they blamed Microsoft for their demise. I think they could have survived it, if they had gotten their program action together. Instead we had five or 6 years of Microsoft prevalence of the browser market, and those were not great years for the web.

But Canter abandoned one thing, but Netscape there never would have been RSS. I pronounced this in a tweet. “Really???” asks Rbonini. Really.

Here’s the method of events which led to RSS 0.91. Obviously this is from my point of view, but all these things did occur and all were required for RSS to turn what it is today.

1. In 1997, as an examination to prove Adam Bosworth, who was pestering me (jn a great way) about XML, I constructed a syndication of my “news site” — Scripting News. I called the format scriptingNews format.

2. In 1998, roughly zero happened with this format. A couple of experiments, but it looked similar to it was going nowhere. I had alternative XML-based projects which appeared to have many some-more promise.

3. Then in 1999, Netscape comes out with RSS 0.90. It does many of what scriptingNews does, and a couple of things it didn’t do. And clamp versa. At initial I was upset, they had often abandoned my work, been exclusive when it would have (imho) been simpler to be compatible.

4. Then I did one of the smartest things I ever did. I surrendered unconditionally. They didn’t even ask me to. I adopted their format. Wholesale. Discarded my old format. The approach I figured it, I had zero to lose and all to gain. Because, and this is the key point — they had await from calm companies, particularly Wired, Salon, Red Herring and Motley Fool. In one step, swallowing my pride, small old Scripting News and all the associated sites which used my software, could stick on the club. So I did it. Goodbye scriptingNews, hello RSS. (It’s a small some-more complicated, I left out a couple of steps, but this is the net-effect.)

Maybe a small alternative BigCo would have come along and do what they did, but with the great of hindsight, zero did. It was years prior to the alternative tech companies adopted RSS, they came in after the edition industry, led by the New York Times. It seems which scriptingNews format would have one after another you do nothing. I could explain to have invented it, but no one would have cared.

Fact is, Netscape did something surprising there, something good. They were a big association which essentially stranded their neck out and did something worthwhile. Did Andreessen fool around a purpose in it? I have no idea. But the association he proposed did it, so if he takes shortcoming for the bad stuff, seems he ought to get credit for the great stuff.

NETSCAPE AND RSS