If Mozilla is getting rid of it and if Chrome doesn't have it, than that's just proof enough that big companies are conspiring against RSS. My fingers crossed for the Adblocker.
RSS Is Dying, and You Should Be Very Worried
61–70 of 197 posts
Re: RSS Is Dying, and You Should Be Very Worried
#62Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
I question the comment's usefulness to this discussion, not the elegance with which it was made (although I think I disagree on that as well).
The comment, to me, is a distraction. Not purposeful I'm sure, but it's had that effect. The fact that the community would vote it up to the point where it might be the first comment someone reads when seeing this thread is disappointing.
Re: RSS Is Dying, and You Should Be Very Worried
#63RSS is dying only if Bloggers don't support it anymore. But I can't see that.
Re: RSS Is Dying, and You Should Be Very Worried
#64The implementation of RSS in Firefox was always an "ultra-lite" version that I doubt will be missed by any serious RSS enthusiasts. A full-featured RSS reader feels a lot like a mailing list, so I think it's appropriate to keep RSS in Thunderbird rather than Firefox. In some respects, a web-app RSS reader (like Bloglines or Google Reader) is better. You can access your feeds from any computer, the read/unread status…
I've always used the browser RSS button precisely in order to add feeds to Google Reader -- I feel like that's the button's main use case. It's an immediate, standard way to see whether a page offers a feed, and to quickly save the feed in your reader. I've found it incredibly useful.
Re: RSS Is Dying, and You Should Be Very Worried
#65It'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…
Why do you think I’m worried?
Because auto-discovery isn't working on his site either? (At least in Safari)
Re: RSS Is Dying, and You Should Be Very Worried
#66RSS 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 fin…
I know the rss reader fever (by Shaun Inman) tries to do something like this.
Re: RSS Is Dying, and You Should Be Very Worried
#67RSS 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…
> And even for technical users like me, [RSS] isn't solving the main problem I have which is discovering new and interesting content.
I have no expectation for it to solve that. It serves its purpose well. I'm thankful for widespread RSS and love using it.
Re: RSS Is Dying, and You Should Be Very Worried
#68The replacement for RSS isn't Facebook and Twitter...it's email. People don't understand RSS but they understand: "Enter your email address to subscribe to updates." Hence the reason that CPM rates for email are so much higher...
Re: RSS Is Dying, and You Should Be Very Worried
#69Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 m…
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.
That's a hell of a good idea actually. Having a count of items that popped on a website since your last visit would be a really useful information.
Re: RSS Is Dying, and You Should Be Very Worried
#70RSS 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…
> And even for technical users like me, [RSS] isn't solving the main problem I have which is discovering new and interesting content. I have no expectation for it to solve that. It serves its purpose well. I'm thankful for widespread RSS and love using it.
To be clear I have no expectation for RSS to solve the discoverability problem either, and I think RSS/Atom/PubSubHubbub is very useful. I'm just noting why I believe they aren't heavily used by most people, and in particular, me.