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“We removed the RSS feed since this technology became obsolete”

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Re: “We removed the RSS feed since this technology became obsolete”

#191

Post by awiesenhofer »

DannyBee wrote: post #79
kgran wrote: post #33

I got the same argument after I asked why there's no more RSS/Atom feed of the news section in my municipality's website. Some positive people tell me that RSS is not dead and it's still everywhere. Unfortunately, especially after modern redesigns, RSS gets dropped as "obsolete technology". The sad thing is that this doesn't only happen to optional websites which I could choose not to follow out of principle like blo…

Y'all need to lean into the game a bit. Most of the time, things don't win or stay just because they are good. They win because of good marketing, etc. RSS, the brand, is a loser at this point. It is viewed as old, tired, and obsolete. It doesn't matter if it is the right tech. That's not a state you can grow from. At this point the right answer (IMHO) is to create a new thing that is very similar, but has a new bran…

This is probably the most on point comment in all of these RSS discussions.

Just publicly dropping the "old" XML-based version and introducing the "new" JSON-based version would probably bring a brand new flair and growing adoption to feeds. (Nevermind json feeds existed for years)

Now we just need someone to pull it off...

Re: “We removed the RSS feed since this technology became obsolete”

#192

Post by shockeychap »

jacobr1 wrote: post #126
shockeychap wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm trying to figure out if this is serious or parody. You do know that RSS is a spec, not a brand, right? Right?

If we use the term brand to mean, "reputation," then yes, adoption is a function of reputation. Reputation can be justly granted (due to things like the functional value it provided) but it also can be disparaged regardless of the merit of the argument. If enough people think that RSS sucks, is too old, died with GReader, has no user-base, or whatever other story, why would they invest their time and effort in suppor…

Okay, I get that "brand" means "reputation", but why should a highly useful technology be worried about it's "brand". Is the "car" brand out of vogue? What about HTML? I mean, that stuff was used in crickety old sites from the 90s! Should we throw away our hammers, because screws are all the rage?

This whole notion of RSS' "brand" being the problem just reeks of a used car salesman trying to convince me that spare tires are for chumps.

Re: “We removed the RSS feed since this technology became obsolete”

#193

Post by GuB-42 »

nathcd wrote: post #115

I'm a very happy daily RSS user, but we ought to be upfront about its ginormous deficiencies: - every day I deal with broken links and broken images because my feed reader doesn't know from which URL it should resolve relative links - there's no pagination mechanism, or way for a client to ask for "all posts since last Friday". If you want your feed to always have all posts available, you need to include the entirety…

What's wrong with XML? It has its flaws, but so do JSON, YAML, and all the other formats.

In fact, for a standard, I like XML despite its verbosity because it supports schemas, essentially a machine readable specification. Also, the entire web runs on HTML, which is poorly defined XML, so why not?

Re: “We removed the RSS feed since this technology became obsolete”

#196

Post by Anthony-G »

I suspect the NGO in question simply has no idea of how many people were using their news-feed. If it’s not in the Google Analytics report, it’s not being used.

Many modern website managers (unlike the “webmasters” of two decades ago) are either unaware that web server logs exist and can provide useful information about web requests (in a privacy-respecting manner) – or they might not have access to them.

Re: “We removed the RSS feed since this technology became obsolete”

#200

Post by nathcd »

GuB-42 wrote: post #193
nathcd wrote: post #115

I'm a very happy daily RSS user, but we ought to be upfront about its ginormous deficiencies: - every day I deal with broken links and broken images because my feed reader doesn't know from which URL it should resolve relative links - there's no pagination mechanism, or way for a client to ask for "all posts since last Friday". If you want your feed to always have all posts available, you need to include the entirety…

What's wrong with XML? It has its flaws, but so do JSON, YAML, and all the other formats. In fact, for a standard, I like XML despite its verbosity because it supports schemas, essentially a machine readable specification. Also, the entire web runs on HTML, which is poorly defined XML, so why not?

All formats do indeed suck, but not equally (YAML does suck equally, though). Your point about HTML is the best argument for XML though, since every client needs an 8 million LOC HTML parser anyway.

It was probably a mistake to resurrect this flame war about serialization formats. XML works, it's just a bummer.

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