Kevin Burton’s NEW FeedBlog

Looks like the IETF has now signed off on Atom as a ‘Proposed Standard’:

Some members of the working group remain unenthusiastic about some sections of the document, but the chairs strongly believe that there is rough (or better) consensus in support of the document as a whole. For some of the parts with the most contention, there cannot be more than very rough consensus due to basic differences in the way people would design parts of the format, particularly given that we have many models in existence with the different flavors of RSS. For some parts of the document, there is contention about whether or not a particular item should or should not be in the Atom core versus being an extension. For some parts, there is contention whether there should be MUST/SHOULD/MAY leeway for content creators in the presence or absence of an element, or the semantic content of an element; the group really pushed RFC 2119 around during the past few months.

Wow. They make it sound so exciting to work within the IETF! It’s amazing how much debate these small items can create.

Update:

Tim Bray talks about this as well