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It's time to head back to RSS?

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Re: It's time to head back to RSS?

#231

Post by jimktrains2 »

jon_richards wrote: post #154
princekolt wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The email protocols are hell. Absolute hell. I don’t think anyone truly groks how it works all the way down either. A big difference is that email has slowly been developed over a period of decades, and so a lot of great software (both libs and GUIs) were built on top of it, and “perfected” over the time. Maybe what prevented RSS from reaching the same level of development is that RSS is only composed by “creators”,…

An example: My server sends notification emails to the company automatically. Everyone is using gmail to view their emails. When there is an update about a previous notification, I send an email with the in-reply-to header. Oh wait, gmail doesn't use that. Alright, I'll just make sure that the subject line is exactly the same as the original notification (as gmail says to do). This works for a bit, but if someone hit…

I believe Gmail will thread when the message I'd and/or references reference each other. (Otherwise it's hit or miss, like you said.)

https://cr.yp.to/immhf/thread.html

Re: It's time to head back to RSS?

#232

Post by Jetroid »

_pctq wrote: post #164

Funny, I've set up a RSS reader again just this week. Prior to that, my main source of information was google feed (when you sweep right on android main screen - for those who don't know it, it's a feed of news curated by google supposed to match our interests). I totally loved it, as it properly detected my interests and shown articles about them even from websites I don't know about. But lately, I saw more and more…

> it's a feed of news curated by google supposed to match our interests

Really? I've always found it to be awful, majority things I am not interested in.

I just checked, and only 2 in 10 were mildly interesting to me. Three of them were about sports, which is way off the mark for me.

Does it optimise based on my interactions with that application in particular, or is it meant to be linked with the rest of my google account?

Re: It's time to head back to RSS?

#233

Post by keypress »

icebraining wrote: post #203
keypress wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Usenet with dial-up was good for this. You'd compose your reply, then look it back up, read over, amend, perhaps delete or send later. It made for more considered responses. I've noticed with HN it's very swarm-like and transient these days. Comment following is also difficult without some thread control. At a minimum you need collapsible threads. Too much to read, don't bother, say something that's been said already…

HN has collapsible threads nowadays (it's the [-] symbol on the post header).

Oh bloody hell, I never figured that out. Used to use some js for that.

Re: It's time to head back to RSS?

#234

Post by consultSKI »

Many of us never left. Yes, it was disappointing for a few days when google changed horses. Their loss. The article failed to mention that RSS feeds are the backbone of Amazon's Alexa Flash Briefings. Seems once again, Bezos and crew know best.

Shameless plug for our Flash Briefing (available on Alexa, iTunes, and our website but only available the days ending in "y"): http://jmpurl.info/flashbriefing

Re: It's time to head back to RSS?

#235

Post by modernerd »

pmlnr wrote: post #193
modernerd wrote: post #87

Yes. But please not RSS. At least newer initiatives like JSON Feed have maintainers who respond to requests for improvements. RSS feels like an abandoned standard. I tried to submit an improvement to the author directly to explicitly allow HTTPS URLs in light of upcoming iTunes changes to enforce HTTPS; they said by email that of course HTTPS resources are valid in their view, but they weren't prepared to actively up…

Does it matter, really? RSS, Atom, JSON, microformats, whatever; there are libraries that can parse any of these. What matters is the idea behind them, the technical implementation is secondary. Please don't revive the format wars.

I agree with the spirit of, “better to popularise independent syndication than fight over formats” except:

> the technical implementation is secondary

Until users get a bad experience that can't be solved easily because the spec was set in stone over a decade ago.

Or until people want to extend and improve the spec to create new standards that prevent fractured and disparate extensions to it.

Technical implementation is often secondary, but RSS already failed to achieve mainstream status once. That is not all down to the RSS spec, but recognising that RSS is a candidate for obsoletion and building on something active and progressive might give the idea of indie syndication a healthier second/third/fourth chance.

A non-dead spec that's actively tended, marketed, and used for building great new platforms may garner more interest and prevent the “been there — tried that — it wasn't for me” that RSS seems to induce in non-techies.

Re: It's time to head back to RSS?

#236

Post by mkirklions »

consultSKI wrote: post #234

Many of us never left. Yes, it was disappointing for a few days when google changed horses. Their loss. The article failed to mention that RSS feeds are the backbone of Amazon's Alexa Flash Briefings. Seems once again, Bezos and crew know best. Shameless plug for our Flash Briefing (available on Alexa, iTunes, and our website but only available the days ending in "y"): http://jmpurl.info/flashbriefing

I think the world is moving to a repeatable and reusable style of storing data.

RSS and JSON have become standards that people can use for data on multiple platforms.

Re: It's time to head back to RSS?

#237

Post by RantyDave »

walshemj wrote: post #170
princekolt wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The email protocols are hell. Absolute hell. I don’t think anyone truly groks how it works all the way down either. A big difference is that email has slowly been developed over a period of decades, and so a lot of great software (both libs and GUIs) were built on top of it, and “perfected” over the time. Maybe what prevented RSS from reaching the same level of development is that RSS is only composed by “creators”,…

:-) RFC822 mail is fairly simple at its heart - X.400 was a lot more detailed

"sendmail gets rather confused by bytes between 128 and 159; it uses them for internal macro handling."

https://cr.yp.to/immhf/header.html

That's got to be a sitter of a security hole for something, right?

Re: It's time to head back to RSS?

#238

Post by [deleted] »

wybiral wrote: post #148
awiesenhofer wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you and HN in general vastly overstates the gravitas of the Google Reader shutdown. I loved it too but the demise of RSS happened probably more because of people switching to Twitter, Facebook and others as their "aggregator" than by killing off one RSS-Reader.

If Google had just added comments or other social elements to their reader instead of killing it they might not have missed the boat. Instead they killed their popular Reader and made Orkut and Google Plus.

[deleted]

Re: It's time to head back to RSS?

#240

Post by your-nanny »

Jetroid wrote: post #232
_pctq wrote: post #164

Funny, I've set up a RSS reader again just this week. Prior to that, my main source of information was google feed (when you sweep right on android main screen - for those who don't know it, it's a feed of news curated by google supposed to match our interests). I totally loved it, as it properly detected my interests and shown articles about them even from websites I don't know about. But lately, I saw more and more…

> it's a feed of news curated by google supposed to match our interests Really? I've always found it to be awful, majority things I am not interested in. I just checked, and only 2 in 10 were mildly interesting to me. Three of them were about sports, which is way off the mark for me. Does it optimise based on my interactions with that application in particular, or is it meant to be linked with the rest of my google a…

I also find that it gives me articles of ... Dubious quality
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