Brent Simmons – author of NetNewsWire – comments on Echo. And Gary Lawrence Murphy does as well. They express reticent doubts. I agree.

I still don‘t feel an urge to call for a new format for syndication. After having studied RSS 1.0 everything in it made sense to me and I don‘t see a single issue that is „addressed“ by the Echo project that couldn‘t be done with new namespaces and accompanying documents tying it all together under the roof of RSS 1.0 or RDF.

And I really don‘t get why people are still putting up „XML“ buttons on their blogs. This is not about XML, it is about RSS and/or RDF. Advertising „content syndication“ as XML is like calling iCalendar files as „ASCII“. It‘s the semantics, stupid.

Maybe Echo might serve the specific needs of a new blogging tool industry as a common storage or transport format but there is no need for a new non-RDF language that does not contribute to the Semantic Web.