many users use webkit and write a program that evaluates, stores the content effectively building a personal rss.
moreover.com has many precompiled rss feeds for various subjects.
RSS Is Dying, and You Should Be Very Worried
51–60 of 197 posts
Re: RSS Is Dying, and You Should Be Very Worried
#52This. "Every website should not look like a NASCAR advert for every sharing service in existence."
That's one reason I've always thought bookmarklets were better for sharing, not the least of which is because you don't need to wait/hope the website operator adds support for the sharing site you are using.
Re: RSS Is Dying, and You Should Be Very Worried
#53"It gives less of a shite than a French man smoking a cigarette in public" Um...what?
Really HN? We're upvoting this? No offense to the commenter, but we can do better.
I don't think so, actually. I'd be hard put to make that comment's point any more elegantly.
In person, the right response to the original sentence would be a polite cough, followed by a brief but significant silence, followed by a slight but detectable face-saving change of subject. We can't do those things on the web, but in this case "um... what?" is an artful alternative.
Re: RSS Is Dying, and You Should Be Very Worried
#54Curious why none of the comments, nor the original article, mentions Internet Explorer. They've continued to add new features in this area ever since IE7. The icon is hidden now in IE9 (as are most of the icons... less browser chrome is fashionable) but I believe they still consider this a first-class feature.
They are still the world's most popular browser... and presumably their users are less technical, so presumably it's usage is less than what Mozilla reports, but it remains.
Re: RSS Is Dying, and You Should Be Very Worried
#55It's hard to take the author's concern seriously, when I can't even find the RSS link on his/her page.
because the browser is supposed to provide the button . Why do you think I’m worried? I don’t want to have to clutter my site with a button to an XML feed that nobody understands. I want the browser auto-discovery to do the right thing and present the right interface to make RSS worthwhile. Turning the key in a car shouldn’t present you a diagram on how to connect the battery. Browsers shouldn’t sit there dumbfounded…
Your analogy doesn't work for me. A car is built to run when you turn it on. That is basic functionality. The reverse analogy to a browser would be "making an HTTP request shouldn't present you a diagram on how to do DNS resolution," and the browser doesn't.
Re: RSS Is Dying, and You Should Be Very Worried
#56RSS isn't dying because browsers are deciding not to build native readers into their UIs. It's dying because it's not terribly easy to understand for most users. The article readily points this out. And even for technical users like me, it isn't solving the main problem I have which is discovering new and interesting content. Sure, once I've found some new source of content it's nice to put its RSS feed into a reader…
> Sure, once I've found some new source of content it's nice to put its RSS feed into a reader
This is why most linkblogs are now twitter feeds. Even Andy Baio’s is still a subset of what he twitters.
My problem in RSS feeds is importance, some sort of metric of popularity would be good. A lot of times I’ll remove a feed for curatorial purposes to have that site drop some major project that goes viral, and I then find out several weeks later.
The entire concept of RSS is somewhat flawed for what happens in the real world. It would be a lot better to create some XML encapsulation of what the front page of the NYT does in terms of curatorial importance.
Re: RSS Is Dying, and You Should Be Very Worried
#57> Mozilla outright refuse to listen (33 bloody votes!)
Wow, 33 votes. They're really ignoring the masses on that one.
Re: RSS Is Dying, and You Should Be Very Worried
#58If there was really enough demand for RSS, it wouldn't die.
Re: RSS Is Dying, and You Should Be Very Worried
#59Why should this particular incantation receive special treatment over others?
How are other elements not specially treated? Also, this will make a good reading: http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/struct/links.html#h-12.3 "Although LINK has no content, it conveys relationship information that may be rendered by user agents in a variety of ways (e.g., a tool-bar with a drop-down menu of links)."
Well put; what I believe in is that user agents should do their absolute best to make the most sense of what information is available to it in the context of the UI paradigm of the user agent. i.e. there is not enough screen space on phones for every website to fit an RSS icon; the browser should do the best thing that befits its UI and help minimise the efforts of the user to get the information they want. RSS can massively help with that.
Imagine for example that on the Chrome home page, where sites you visit often appear, Chrome also was following the RSS of these sites in the background, and listing new news items for those sites on the home page, all without you having to do anything.
There is infinite possibility here for browser vendors to make browsing quicker, easier and more intelligent and RSS is a key part of that. The browser vendors are not interested in exploring this avenue and as such everybody is stuck doing the same stupid routine every single day. This is dumb! Our computers should be smarter than this!
Re: RSS Is Dying, and You Should Be Very Worried
#60I frankly never got into RSS until I started using RockMelt about a month ago. Now I use it all the time to tell me when there are new Hacker News post, etc. But unfortunately the only clickable link for the Hacker News RSS takes me to the story, which is often an external link. If I want to see the "discuss" of the story I have to manually go the website and find the post and click the discuss link. Perhaps RSS need…
Google Reader displays a comment link, which I always click and then click through to the article if the link is still alive from there. That's a problem with a bad RSS reader, not RSS, or HN, who would actually be at fault here.