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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”

#221

Post by hpfr »

nanna wrote: post #156
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…

Maybe try another reader? What are you using? None of these are issues for me in my feed reader, Emacs Elfeed. (XML aside, though I can't say I've ever had to view any feed's source.) https://github.com/skeeto/elfeed

Can you view relative links (for footnotes) in Elfeed? That hasn't been my experience.

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

#223

Post by redwall_hp »

oauea wrote: post #165
grozzle wrote: post #92

The whole (non-Spotify, ugh) podcast ecosystem would like a word about RSS being obsolete. Patreon (and to a greater extent, the podcasters I support) keep making real money out of me and millions of others every month for personalised RSS feeds for content. That RSS feed is the delivery vehicle. It's very reliable, I can use it in any app, much good, so benefit, wow.

> The whole (non-Spotify, ugh) podcast ecosystem would like a word about RSS being obsolete Off topic, but it's insane how Spotify insists on advertising podcasts to paying users. Worse, they advertise podcasts of American right wing extremists, and call it "Something you might like" or similar offensive wording. I'm not even American, and I'm subjected to unwanted foreign political content on my music player's home…

Spotify isn't even American...they started in Sweden and operated in the EU for years before coming to the US. It was a big deal when they finally opened up here. Their disgusting partnership with right-wing degenerates is bizarre as well as obnoxious.

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

#224

Post by ksec »

nomemory wrote: post #69

This hurts. RSS is the only way I know, without having to scrap things by hand, to get an aggregate of "news/articles" from the sites and blogs I follow, and I consider to be of good quality. I prefer to filter my information like this, instead of having to rely on some algorithm, or endlessly scrolling in a "social medial wall" full or clickbait articles, immortal/vintage memes or exuberant rants. If RSS dies, what…

When Google Reader was still a thing there are at least some consumer knows what that orange button means. ( Now it is only for podcast ) And most browser have RSS support so it has end point for consumer to interact with it. But then for some strange reason most browser vendor decide to kill it.

I still think RSS reader should be a feature on browser. All the modern browser now have sync as well so porting your news feeds isn't even the problem anymore.

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

#225

Post by mananaysiempre »

nathcd wrote: post #200
GuB-42 wrote: post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

A parser for what most people think of as XML can be fairly simple, certainly simpler than a performant or even just error-tolerant parser for HTML. Though Yxml[1] is probably overdoing it, what with its lack of Unicode handling or tree construction, a couple of tens of kilobytes seems like the right order of magnitude to me. Heavier than JSON, but not drastically so, unless you decide you also need three types of schemas, two types of XPath, XSLT, etc. (the libxml2[2] approach).

The thing that requires the most bookkeeping is also the thing that nobody uses and not a lot of people even know about: a full textual macro system by the name of (the “internal DTD subset”), which a conformant XML processor is required to implement. (Not coincidentally, this is the part that the XML profile mandated by XMPP excludes.) There was a proposal to define something that excludes this part by the name of MicroXML[3], but it threw out compatibility by also excluding namespaces, and it doesn’t seem it actually went anywhere.

[1]: https://dev.yorhel.nl/yxml

[2]: http://www.xmlsoft.org/

[3]: https://www.w3.org/community/microxml/wiki/Main_Page

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

#226

Post by cyanydeez »

thiht wrote: post #187
mfer wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If RSS dies, what is the alternative then? I understand that technically speaking it's not a good solution, but let's have something else before killing this. Instead of focusing on a technology, let's focus on a problem. This is where users and potential users of RSS have a communication problem with publishers of content. It used to be that the masses consumed RSS feeds. So, you could have metrics on that. But, t…

> It used to be that the masses consumed RSS feeds Uh, really? When I was younger I came across RSS a few times but could never figure what it was or how it worked. When I clicked RSS links, big walls of XML appeared. And when I looked for what it was, all I could find was something along the lines of « it’s to syndicate content ». Or in French: « c’est de la syndication de contenus ». I don’t know if the term « synd…

litterally my experience. it was some weird inside joke a very limited generation got.

thats why its dead.

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

#227

Post by DannyBee »

shockeychap wrote: post #192
jacobr1 wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ti…

Being highly useful is simply not enough. It never has been. OS/2 did not win.

The world is littered with highly useful technologies that nobody adopts, or eventually die to less useful, arguably objectively worse technologies. Adoption and software life cycles are not a techo-meritocracy.

In short - you are completely and totally ignoring the social aspects of software adoption and use. But they are, in fact, often the most important part. I don't actually particularly like this any more than any other software engineer - it often feels wrong. That does not (and will not) make it any less of a reality.

(as an aside, yes, in fact, as joist hangers and ties and such became more and more required due to code or construction method, structural screws became all the rage - nailing joist hangers/etc with regular framing nail guns was hard and dangerous, but structural screws just require an impact driver or a screw gun to do safely. Now they actually have specialized metal connector nailers, so structural screws are getting ignored again outside of decks)

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

#228

Post by bluefox »

polote wrote: post #50

Is RSS really a technology or a part of the failed attempt of having a semantic web (the real web 3.0) ? RSS is easily replaceable by just scrapping a website, technologically speaking it doesn't make sense to have everyone making a request to website every minute. We could have a central service responsible for that, but I guess it will centralized and some people don't like that

It doesn't mean everyone is making a request to a website every minute. I use http://gwene.org/ for example. To me RSS or Atom are a major success, as the blogs I want to read almost always seem to have them. Those that don't, well, I used to scrape, but after a while stopped and forgotten about them.

If gwene goes under, it'll suck but I'll have a gwene like on my own server. If RSS goes under, it'll go under here and there, and not wholesale. Good technology is resilient like that.

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

#229

Post by rendall »

adrianmonk wrote: post #182
shadowgovt wrote: post #6

As much as I pine for the days when RSS was ubiquitous, I trust them to have the access logs to conclude that nobody is using their RSS feed.

I wouldn't say I trust them, but I would say it's the most likely explanation. It could be that they've failed to understand how RSS could help their organization achieve its goals. But it's probably just that RSS isn't worth it to them.

Given that RSS done right is a self-maintaining gimme, I would question the professional judgment of anyone who actually takes the time to remove it.
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