nEcho and consensus
nEcho continues to fly off the rails. I'm afraid this process is broken; perhaps, irreparably. (Roger Benningfield, Doug Miller, Zeldman) In the absence of any sort of agreement on the desirability of junking XML-RPC, it seems that people decided to 'declare consensus'.
This sure ain't the consensus I learned about at a Quaker college.
The upshot of requiring every server to support three separate interfaces will be to ensure that none of the interfaces will actually be definitive. This leads, in turn, to the standard being "whatever works". People will write software to cater to bugs. People will write clients for programs, not standards.
nEcho, which launched to a chorus of enthusiasm, has managed to make almost all the people with active, shipping projects feel very queasy. At the very least, someone needs to reaffirm that the "100% vendor neutral pledge" means what it says, and that the process is not a sham. A summit, or a conference call, and some olive branches might salvage this thing.
In the meantime, the Blogging Together Alliance sets out to unite developers.