OK, so they should be smart enough to reverse-engineer it, but really, if you’ve just invented your own flavour of RSS and you want people other than yourself to use it, documenting it would seem to be the smart thing to do. Otherwise, they’re just going to go off, make their own version, and then bitch at you for not using their special flavour, which is superior to yours in at least thirteen ways which they are now going to enumerate for you.
(Actually, they’re probably going to do that anyway. That is what the world of feed formats is like.)
wordpress™ wank 
drmike said
http://forums.sixapart.com/index.php?showtopic=62779
Please see the response from Byrne Reese as well as the Trac tickets.
drmike said
Oh, and thanks, Matt for deleteing my comment on your post. I wonder when Mr. “I don’t have a hidden agenda” will finally admit that he does in fact have one.
(Hey wank. Need a contributor? There’s a lot I’d love to report on. Please email me if your interested)
Alan said
Matt deleted one of my comments a few years back, just prior to WP.com being launched. He was doing a “guess what it is!!!” post, and I quite correctly assumed it’d be hosted WordPress. I’m not really sure of the reasoning. lol
If Matt wants people to adopt WXR for exporting options, I agree, he’s gonna have to document it first. Googling it came up with three WP related links, two about typo creating an export tool (somehow), and one from the wordpress trac. It’s kind of unreasonable to want people to adopt it when you don’t tell them how.
sunburntkamel said
heh, i’ladd my voice to the chorus of people who had a comment about the missing WXR schema on matt’s post deleted.
Alan said
Matt on WXR documentation:
Translation: “They figured it out themselves for one thing already, why bother?”
Root said
When Matt gave a keynote speech on leadership one of his themes was what he called *pre moderation*. I have suffered from it myself. Notoriously he opened a thread *What is wrong with Kubrick* in the forum. Then while he batted away all comers making it clear that they would make no progress one of his henchman was deleting half the contributions. It made for a disjointed dialogue as you can imagine. And the default is still a mess. 🙂
that girl again said
My comment went missing too, but you knew that already, right?
I suppose the big advantage of forcing third parties to reverse-engineer import/export is that they will find the bugs for you and hopefully fix them. 😉 Importing from WXR helps 6A more than it helps wordpress, so they had an incentive to figure that out. Since WP already supports the MT import/export format, and it’s supported by multiple tools rather than just the one, 6A have no visible incentive to export in Matt’s new format. They have zero reason to encourage people to migrate to WP, which Matt should know better than anyone seeing as how he refused to provide an export feature for years.
If you seriously want people to adopt your new standard instead of the existing one, you need to explain why it’s better and lower the barriers to using it. ‘Because I say so’ might cut it with the fanboys but it’s not going to work on your rivals.
Andrea said
Oh yes, another case of “If you just read the code, you’ll know what it does”.
Root said
Or * if you read the code you will know what it could have looked like if you’d written it yourself* . 🙂