So, its my humble opinion that the DVD release of the Matrix significantly impacted the adoption of surround sound home theater systems in general, and DVD players specifically.  Along these lines, I would like to officially predict that the Matrix:Reloaded will drive the adoption of HDTV in general, and hi-def DVD in particular. 

Last Monday, the official website offered a new, higher resolution version of the final theatrical trailer.  Of course, I quickly downloaded it, shut off all my lights, turned up my speakers, cursed that my lame trial version of the quicktime player didn't support full screen, cursed again that the trailer was in quicktime instead of ASF, and hit play.

After picking up my jaw and wiping the drool from my keyboard, I cursed again.  as stated on their website:

[this trailer] has a resolution that far surpasses DVD. Pulled right off the editing Avid, this 1000x540, 24 frames a second, progressive version of the trailer is easily among the highest resolutions being offered for download anywhere.

Its after 3AM.  If it were 12 hours ago, I would never post this. But here I am typing, about how geeks argue.

Dave winer rants on scriptingnews.com:

I used to work reasonably well with designers until CSS came along. Now my writing is supposed to be a soldier in the fight for Web "standards." Help. My work has to look great in MSIE, and I can't wait for the other browsers to fix their bugs. So I'm going to use paragraphs and breaks and old unbuggy stuff like that where I need to.

...

Look at it this way. We're all locked in a trunk. You can't get out of the trunk by smearing ketchup on my tie. It won't make the guys driving the car lose any money. They can't even see into the trunk. It's locked, from the outside. 

Mark replies:

Enough already »

I used to work reasonably well with Dave Winer until the RSS validator came along. Now my feed is supposed to be a soldier in the fight for “validation” and “standards”. Help. My syndicated feed has to look great in NetNewsWire (according to my site statistics, it has more than 4 times the market share of Radio), and I can’t wait for the other newsreaders to fix their bugs. So I’m going to skip required elements and use invalid XML whenever it suits me, and to hell with the validator, and to hell with these newfangled “standards”.

Look at it this way. We’re all locked in a trunk. You can’t get out of the trunk by smearing designers. You can’t get out of the trunk at all. Do not try and get out of the trunk. That’s impossible. Instead only try to realize the truth. There is no trunk. Then you’ll see that it is not the trunk that locks, it is only yourself.

A large portion of the blogsphere goes apeshit over Winer (or maybe not?) calling Mark (and a litany of others) an asshole.

Everyone seems to miss the interesting points:

1. Dave always complains about how Microsoft uses its unique market position to influence/degrade/debunk standards. His basic argument is that microsoft can choose to implement whichever standards it wants, and will not be held accountable for not implementing other standards (or improperly implementing the standards it chooses), because of its unique position.
2. Ironically, Dave himself has become the 800 pound gorilla.  Standards are growing, evolving, and struggling all around him.  Because of his unique market position, he chooses which standards his company will implement, and how completely it will implement them. 
3. In comments, Mark continues to illustrate that microsoft may not have the unique market position that it once had.
4. Further, Radio Userland may not have the unique market position that it once had.

I might add, browsers in general do not have the unique market positions that they once had.

So, in the coming months, which 800 pound gorilla will prove to be more agile, and actually meet the needs of the next generation of standards, applications, and users?

I see writing on the wall...

But first, a question of etiquette; If a known blogger replies to a post via email, should it be assumed that said blogger wouldn't appreciate being mentioned in a public forum? I'll error on the side of caution...

In response to my previous post, it has been pointed out that:

...it is impossible to express some of the characteristics of RSS 2.0 in a W3C XML Schema.   -Source Omitted

The commentor went on to cite Jorgen Thelin's 'blog;  apparently, Jorgen has been attempting to derive an XSD schema for Rss 2.0 for some time now, with moderate difficulty.  Hats off to Jorgen! If i have any time to play with, i'll be sure to toy around with his schema. Can't wait to see what VS.Net has to say about it.  Wonder if Strong-Typed DataSets know what to do with pattern restrictions?  I doubt it... decorator pattern, here I come..

Jorgen goes on to list 9 issues he's had in creating his schema;  since his original post, 7 of the 9 issues have been resolved.  The remaining two issues aern't show stoppers;  one has to do with the dublin core extensions (which should have their own namespace and associated XSD schema, anyway), and the other has to do with mandatory inclusion of title or description (i say, make both mandatory... what could it hurt?).

Clearly, XSD isn't perfect for everything;  but its gotta be better than ascii.  If you were to expand the annotations/documentations in the xsd schema, what else would you need in order to express the same rules outlined in the text version of the spec? 

Further, the "Version" attribute of the rss channel is just basically silly.  What version of the spec does this doc compy to? easy, check the namespaces of the root element.  Thats how this whole xml thing was supposed to work.  I shouldn't have to know the structure of the doc to determine its version;  thats kinda obvious.