2007-08-18
Dave Winer Visits Mozilla
Dave Winer visited Mozilla yesterday to give a talk about RSS during the all hands meetings. I've been a reader of Dave's blog for awhile and was previously a Radio Userland user for a couple of years so it was good to meet him in person.
He outlined his views on the 'river of news' format of aggregating feeds that Radio Userland uses. This seems to be Dave's preferred way of dealing with RSS. The advantage of this approach is that the new news items appear at the top of the list so you can quickly scan the new information and discard the old if you don't have time. I don't think he was too impressed with the way Firefox handles RSS feeds with the 'live bookmarks' and the way things are handed off to external readers.
I briefly talked to Dave afterwards about the new Video and Audio elements that are being specified, and about the Video implementation in Firefox. This came up in the context of if it was possible to build a podcast player in a web browser. With the video/audio elements I think this is more than possible and could make for a great user experience - all in standards (or at least, draft standard) based HTML.
On his blog he wrote about following up on his ideas on integrating RSS and podcasting into the web browser. I'm interested in seeing what he has to say on this and how the new functionality we are implementing could help with this.
