*** Sorry for the double post.  SOMEONE (*cough*me*cough*) meant to delete a spam comment and instead deleted the whole entry ** 

Techcrunch has a piece by guest author Josh Fraser which deals with the differences between two emerging "Push" based technologies, RSSCloud and PubSubHubBub.  I agree with just about everything he says but one quote really bothered me...

Dave Winer deserves the credit for coming up with the idea long before anyone else.  In fact, the <cloud> element was added to the RSS 2.0 specification in 2001, but has only recently been revived (largely in response to the interest in PuSH).

Now I'm not trying to take away from Mr. Winer's decision which was a good one.  But he wasn't the first to think of it and I feel looking back at who was first teaches us something.

That's why someone should mention both Internet Explorer and Netscape had Push technology integrated with version 4.0 of their respective browsers.  That was in 1997, a full 2 years before the first version of RSS was even published.

In truth RSS was inferior to both Microsoft's Active Channel and Netscape's Netcaster technology but neither company could agree to support the other so push technology fell to the wayside.  Now it's 12 years later and we're finally working our way back to technology that was introduced in 1997. 

The reason for those lost 12 years is simple: Neither Microsoft nor Netscape would compromise.  So both technologies disappeared and "Pull" technology jumped in to fill the void. 

As we enter into yet another format war (PubSubHubBub vs. RSSCloud) I hope people look to the past and realize how much of a detour can be caused by disagreement.  12 years is a lot of time to lose in the technology industry and it would be sad to see us lose another 12 because of petty squabbling.