Work(ing Title)

Niall’s session at Bloggercon yesterday was focused on standards for users. He wanted to talk about how standards for users are designed and what we all want from standards. That could have been a really interesting talk, but Dave had his own ideas. According to the docNography:

Dave: let’s give 5 minutes to learning how RSS works.

At this point the notes go cold, which is unfortunate because the next 20-30 minutes were the most heated and exciting that day. Niall graciously threw his energies into walking everyone through Doc’s RSS file, explaining each line of code in plain English.

Dave interjected at different points to address some hacks in the file, which signaled a downward spiral. Ponzi took a moment from running the mic around the room and pointed out that for as legible as Dave proported RSS to be, there were still a handful of lines that required extra explanation.

Soon after that I felt the urge to try and convince Dave of my feeling that his exercise didn’t really hold a lot of value for people (a fool’s errand in hindsight) so long as the code did its job. The conversation lost any appearance of usefulness at that point, but Niall brilliantly got us all back on track and wrapped up his abridged talk. All in all he did a yeoman’s job dealing with the least comfortable hour of the day.

Check out the Standards for Users mp3 for all the hot talk.

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