Live data from Hacker News

It’s Time to Get Back to RSS

danielmiessler.com

61–70 of 376 posts

Re: It’s Time to Get Back to RSS

#61
post #53

RSS is dying (or dead) because it was incompatible with the dominant business model on the internet -- advertising. This is why Google killed it. This is why lots of professional publishers hated it. With HTTP you'd be able to earn money via embedded ads but you'd earn exactly $0 via RSS since the feed was stripped of ads, just content. This forced publishers to put useless blurbs, redirecting to the HTTP version, wh…

So maybe a combination of RSS and Brave?

Re: It’s Time to Get Back to RSS

#62
post #20

If we get back to RSS, can we at least all stick to Atom 1.0 :) ? It's way stricter, simpler and easier to use, and I never found a parser that was not accepting it.

When people don't use extra namespaces and everything is consistent, Atom 1.0 works great. And I understand why namespaces exist, but they create this system where each site speaks its own language and that fundamentally undermines the whole point of RSS as this shared way of communicating.

Re: It’s Time to Get Back to RSS

#63

This is why I was so heartbroken when Mozilla removed first party RSS support from Firefox, for what seemed like an extremely flimsy justification.[1] RSS should be ubiquitous, and seen as an essential part of any service that serves structured incremental content. People should be emailing webmasters asking why there is no little orange icon. It also serves as a back door form of accessibility. But I strongly suspec…

I don't understand why they removed support for it. Isn't RSS a "solved issue" - what possible updates can be made to it? Why couldn't they just keep it available and forget about it.

The functionality was never polished, and there were some fairly serious technical problems with the implementation due to lack of maintenance, seen often in apparently minor things like https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=337897.

I can readily understand why they removed it—it was implemented in what had become the wrong way for such a feature, and fixing it would have taken more effort than they wanted to expend on such a niche feature, and it was starting to hold back other improvements. (Similar deal to why they broke old extensions: they were holding the browser back technically, and a couple of years later I think it was fairly clearly the right decision, painful though it was.)

Re: It’s Time to Get Back to RSS

#66
Twitter has replaced RSS for all intents and purposes.

I miss Google Reader and RSS too, but the world has changed. Another reason RSS is in the past is because it was a means of delivering long blog articles which only a small minority of internet users has the interest or attention span for.

You miss RSS because you miss 2007.

Re: It’s Time to Get Back to RSS

#67
post #20

If we get back to RSS, can we at least all stick to Atom 1.0 :) ? It's way stricter, simpler and easier to use, and I never found a parser that was not accepting it.

I strongly agree: Atom is technically substantially superior to RSS, and in regular feed readers is supported universally (with fewer issues, e.g. fields like title and description are definitely plain text or HTML, as specified, rather than the RSS approach which leads to clients guessing all sorts of different things so that you can’t safely use things like angle brackets in titles).

However, the podcasting industry seems to have ignored Atom, which is stupid. Podcast feeds are exclusively RSS, and from information found, most major clients probably don’t support Atom. But the area is a mess with no good documentation anywhere on what works or doesn’t (and all of the even-halfway-decent content of this sort is from 2006–2010).

————

People colloquially refer to feeds as RSS, even when they’re mostly Atom. Reminds me a bit of the SSL/TLS situation (where I think the name “TLS” is finally more popular than the name “SSL”).

Re: It’s Time to Get Back to RSS

#68

After google reader went dark i used "The Old Reader" and when they moved to pay only (or they closed? i can't remember) i moved to inoreader its the only way i consume news/blogs. there is no way im checking 40+ websites every day for new content and that way i won't miss anything if a site has no RSS or its RSS feed doesn't work right chances are i just won't use that site

> and when they moved to pay only (or they closed? i can't remember)

The incident you are thinking about, would be when they said they were going to close the service entirely, because of the volume of signups they had in the aftermath of Google Reader closing. https://blog.theoldreader.com/post/56798895350/desperate-tim...

In the end they did not do that, but realising any service I sign up for might close just as readily as Google Reader put me off RSS for years. (I am a paid The Old Reader user now.)

Re: It’s Time to Get Back to RSS

#70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure -- not saying it's as good as presenting make-for-rss posts -- may be helpful in some cases though. At least I'll know that content changes, and if I don't like the virtual feed, I can just link out to the source and view it directly.

I appreciate you sharing. I didn't mean to shoot you down or anything.

No problem -- I didn't take it that way at all!
Post reply on HN