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Now Is the Perfect Time for an RSS Renaissance

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Re: Now Is the Perfect Time for an RSS Renaissance

#41

Post by ken »

craftyguy wrote: post #6
ocdtrekkie wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://jsonfeed.org/ has had some preliminary traction. Of course, the reason RSS works so well is that everyone uses the same format. So you wouldn't see so much of a "switch" as a bunch of readers accepting either format, for a very, very long time. That being said, I don't see what's "wrong" with XML in this context.

Most of the complaints I've seen with the 'wrongness' of xml are centered around its human unreadability, which doesn't matter in this context. I'm curious if there's another reason.

Legibility isn't just for fun.

The entire JSON spec is only about 3 pages long. (I don't know exactly how long because ECMA's webpage is down today!) I'm pretty confident that any popular JSON parser I use will abort correctly on bad JSON. There's no expansion or entities or escaping, so the parser is a pretty boring 1-to-1 translation. Give it a 1KB JSON file, and I'm going to get back a data structure that takes roughly 1KB.

XML is incredibly complicated. My operating system's XML parser has had XXE-related security bugs in the recent past -- that's OWASP bug#4, and there's a Wikipedia article about it. There's other possible attacks, like the "billion laughs attack". I'm very nervous about running an XML parser on untrusted content.

Re: Now Is the Perfect Time for an RSS Renaissance

#42

Post by jklinger410 »

dfee wrote: post #28
douglaswlance wrote: post #21

I'm surprised how often RSS is mentioned on Hackernews, and how infrequently some recommends Feedly. It has wonderful features, like saving articles, collection boards, team features, and popularity-based sorting options. (Full disclosure, I don't work for Feedly nor do I own any of the company. I just like the service!) http://feedly.com

My use of RSS has fallen (very recently) so I only consume a few feeds every day. However, I both enjoy and dislike Feedly. Here’s the rundown: Pros) - advanced features like highlighting, team management - pure free offering that just works - integration with pretty much every feed reader app out there Cons: - no ability/willingness to pull full text - iOS app is honestly kind of clunky I emailed them that I’d willi…

In regards to your full text request. The publisher has the option what to syndicate, truncated or full.

What you are asking them to do is have a crawler go to the site and pull the full text whenever they feel they are being served truncated.

Not only does that go against the nature of RSS, but would be costly for them.

What app do you pay for that does this? Is it even using RSS?

Re: Now Is the Perfect Time for an RSS Renaissance

#43

Post by Mediterraneo10 »

jug wrote: post #39
Mediterraneo10 wrote: post #29

If RSS threatens to become mainstream again, expect pushback from content providers. I know a blog where the owner will ban any commenter from the site for even mentioning that there is an RSS feed. He believes that the RSS feed that his CMS provides by default, is somehow important for SEO, but he doesn’t want people getting his content through RSS because his way of monetizing the site requires that people reguarly…

The obvious solution here seems to be to configure your feed to only provide excerpts? Like the most common default is anyway...

If people go to your website to get the headlines, it is easier to monetize them because they may view ads there, you can market things to them based on their cookie history, etc. That is harder with RSS.

Re: Now Is the Perfect Time for an RSS Renaissance

#44

Post by jklinger410 »

disconnected wrote: post #31

"People" keep rattling on about how RSS needs to be revived. Do these people live in some sort of alternative reality where: - The guardian - BBC - Reuters - Ars Technica - LWN - Hacker News and a fuck ton others don't have an RSS feed? Or some sort or reality where Flym (or the myriads of RSS apps) don't exist? Because I sure as hell don't.

I think this uptick in RSS articles is just a bunch of journalists trying to inspire developers to do something more interesting with the tech.

Re: Now Is the Perfect Time for an RSS Renaissance

#45

Post by chipotle_coyote »

craftyguy wrote: post #6
ocdtrekkie wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://jsonfeed.org/ has had some preliminary traction. Of course, the reason RSS works so well is that everyone uses the same format. So you wouldn't see so much of a "switch" as a bunch of readers accepting either format, for a very, very long time. That being said, I don't see what's "wrong" with XML in this context.

Most of the complaints I've seen with the 'wrongness' of xml are centered around its human unreadability, which doesn't matter in this context. I'm curious if there's another reason.

While I shouldn't speak for JSON Feed's developers (Manton Reece of Micro.blog and Brent Simmons, original developer of RSS/Atom reader NetNewsWire), their argument basically boils down to "developers seem to be better at constructing valid JSON than they are at constructing valid XML."

I know a lot of HN folks will say but you can just construct perfectly valid XML with library such-and-such or API this-and-that and, yes, I'm sure they're all absolutely, positively 100% correct. But in my real-world experience, Reece and Simmons seem to be correct in practice. Given that Simmons wrote NNW, worked at the now-defunct server-side RSS company NewsGator, and is now writing a new RSS (and JSON Feed) reader, I'm inclined to believe that when he says JSON Feed "reflects the lessons learned from our years of work reading and publishing feeds," he means it.

Re: Now Is the Perfect Time for an RSS Renaissance

#46

Post by jklinger410 »

goalieca wrote: post #19
parvenu74 wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's nothing "wrong" with XML but with JSON there's no need to add another 5 pounds (2.2 KG) of JavaScript to convert XML to JavaScript objects. For any other language it doesn't matter since you're re-mapping to objects, most likely, but with JavaScript eating the web (even on the server side) I think the question should be "why shouldn't this be JSON" as a default. In the end either way works. I would love to se…

> There's nothing "wrong" with XML but with JSON there's no need to add another 5 pounds (2.2 KG) of JavaScript to convert XML to JavaScript objects Non web-dev guy here, but browsers have excellent XML parses out there that can turn XML into a document object with a fully fledged query language. Why does it need to be a JS object?

I have an old wordpress blog that I would love to introduce to whatever XML reader you would suggest.

Re: Now Is the Perfect Time for an RSS Renaissance

#47

Post by whorleater »

originalsimba wrote: post #27

Did anyone else notice how corporations like Twitter and Facebook quietly tried to kill RSS in the past 10 years? RSS is a wonderful technology with embodies the spirit of the Internet. Facebook and Twitter are, by comparison, cancer. I often recommend WordPress to folks as an alternative for blogging, because it is free and has RSS functional out of the box.

>I often recommend WordPress to folks as an alternative for blogging

Didn't blogging start on wordpress/blogger/livejournal?

Re: Now Is the Perfect Time for an RSS Renaissance

#48

Post by eropple »

ken wrote: post #41
craftyguy wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most of the complaints I've seen with the 'wrongness' of xml are centered around its human unreadability, which doesn't matter in this context. I'm curious if there's another reason.

Legibility isn't just for fun. The entire JSON spec is only about 3 pages long. (I don't know exactly how long because ECMA's webpage is down today!) I'm pretty confident that any popular JSON parser I use will abort correctly on bad JSON. There's no expansion or entities or escaping, so the parser is a pretty boring 1-to-1 translation. Give it a 1KB JSON file, and I'm going to get back a data structure that takes ro…

Not to be flip, but if you're using a parser written by competent individuals post-2010 (really, post-2008), billion laughs is a nothing.

And that follows for most XML stuff. If you are getting most bloggable with your tech stack, yes, there are certainly risks to XML (also to YAML, also to JSON--and there are definitely JSON parsers that have had some capital-I Issues out there, and a good number of the popular ones also parse not-JSON too). That said, if you're using anything remotely mainstream you can feel reasonably secure against the sorts of attacks you are likely to see because, TBH, your RSS reader is just not that valuable a target. (Or, in my case--the podcast service I'm writing.)

Re: Now Is the Perfect Time for an RSS Renaissance

#49

Post by forapurpose »

jhund wrote: post #17
forapurpose wrote: post #13

I'll repeat my plea for an RSS reader that enables the user (i.e., me) to efficiently process 1,000+ feed items in maybe 20 minutes. Also, it needs to automate aspects of managing feeds (detect when the fail, maybe find a replacement, give me an interface for resolving the problem). By "process" I mean: Read the headline and sometimes the summary, decide whether to read the story, open the story (if I'm reading it),…

At ContentGems.com we aspire to offer some of the features you're looking for. We fetch a ton of feeds each day, index them, and let you filter the items based on a powerful query api (Lucene). So in addition to reading your own feeds, you can also extract interesting content from other feeds and discover new feeds. It also deduplicates articles (on a sliding scale of similarity). We are in the process of building ou…

That's a very interesting approach - pre-processing the feed items (if I understand you correctly). Here are a few more features I would need, as just one potential user:

* Ability to add feeds to your database. Some obscure feeds are important to me.

* Privacy: I don't want to share a list of everything I subscribe to and read. This is a deal-breaker for me; I'm happy to pay for the service.

* UI with no overhead in time and cognitive load. A learning curve is fine - I love Vim, for example - but when I'm reviewing feed items the UI shouldn't delay or distract me. In fact, a keyboard-based UI based on Vim would be awesome (though probably there's not a huge market for that).

Re: Now Is the Perfect Time for an RSS Renaissance

#50

Post by Notre1 »

kungfooguru wrote: post #25
douglaswlance wrote: post #21

I'm surprised how often RSS is mentioned on Hackernews, and how infrequently some recommends Feedly. It has wonderful features, like saving articles, collection boards, team features, and popularity-based sorting options. (Full disclosure, I don't work for Feedly nor do I own any of the company. I just like the service!) http://feedly.com

Agreed. But it has been very frustrating that they haven't allowed boards to be public. Maybe someone knows a service that lets you mark posts from your feed to be shared as a public collection?

Newsblur kind-of has this. You can "Share to your Blurblog," but I don't see a way to have multiple Blurblogs.

You can also tag stories and each tag can have a RSS feed that others to subscribe to, but I don't think there is a web page to send people to for your taggged stories.

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