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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”

#241

Post by callahad »

culopatin wrote: post #240
rrrrrrrrrrrryan wrote: post #218

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> When I clicked RSS links, big walls of XML appeared Putting a (small) tinfoil hat on, Google intentionally chose to botch the handling of rss links in Chrome because they couldn't collect ad revenue through text-only RSS feeds.

Look I don’t have sources but I remember Opera being the only browser back then that would handle RSS

Firefox also had native support for RSS: detecting feeds, rendering them reasonably, even subscription via "live bookmarks." Removed in 2018: https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/live-bookmarks

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

#242

Post by applebees123 »

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…

[flagged]

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

#243

Post by account42 »

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…

> 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

I have never had this problem. Do you have any example feeds you encounter this with? Are you sure its not just a bug in your reader?

> 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 of your archive in every feed response.

Agreed that this would be nice to have, but for its primary purpose - to syndicate new content - this does not matter in practice. Having RSS completely static means that hosting an RSS feed is super simple and does not require the increased attack potential of a dynamic service - something that the current federated web protocols completely fail at. It should of course be possible to host support retrieval of past posts with a static-hosting-compatible protocol, in theory at least.

> if I want to follow any link I get kicked back out to a bloated web page

If that page has a linked RSS feed and a permalink mathing the URL or embedded in the page metadata then in theory your reader could show you the corresponding RSS post. I don't think creating a separate RSS-only web of links makes sense.

> lots of posts include iframes

Lots? Really? iframes are more dead than RSS, at least for anything outside of ads.

> or content that only makes sense with JS enabled

Limiting RSS to static mostly-text content provides a lot of consistency. Most articles don't need JS. For those that do RSS can still link to a webpage just like podcasts don't embed the audio in the RSS feed. There is also nothing stopping an RSS reader from showing link-only posts as an embedded web view - personally I prefer a link that opens in a new browser tab though.

> XML

Ugly, yes, but how is this a problem in practice? Just because it's not as hip as JSON?

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

#244

Post by account42 »

tantalor wrote: post #158
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…

> there's no pagination mechanism Atom has this: https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc5005

From that specs it looks like Archived Feeds using are what should be used for most feeds as pagination does not let you reliably reconstruct the whole feed and is meant more for dynamic content like search results. I'll definitely look at implementing archives for all of my feeds even though client support is probably low - can't expect clients to implement this with no feeds having archives.

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

#245

Post by account42 »

superkuh wrote: post #163
kevincox wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I haven't noticed a WordPress blog where the RSS feed wasn't properly advertised. Does it depend on the theme to include the appropriate link tag? Or maybe it is just sampling bias where I don't notice that WordPress sites are actually wordpress if they don't advertise the feed.

It doesn't help that even Firefox have recently removed RSS/Atom feed autodiscovery and no longer display the icon if there's an RSS head entry. You have to manually type it by knowing common URLs or look at the source. Firefox also removed even the ability to even render RSS feed xml. Now it just asks you to download it like a file. These were very unhealthy choices for a community browser but completely sensible fo…

At this point I'm just waiting for Mozilla to fuck up enough so that there is enough motivation for a hard fork to happen and survive. The only reson I'm using Firefox (without auto updates since Mozilla can't be trusted) is because the chrome monopoly is even worse.

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

#247

Post by account42 »

Arnavion wrote: post #173
thaumasiotes wrote: post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is there a problem with the higher-quality feed other than that you feel silly for providing it?

I'm fine with doing it if that's what everyone else does, but I'm just checking that there isn't a cleaner way.

Typically you don't include all past articles in the RSS/Atom feed document but only "recent" ones where what recent means varies from site to site depending how often they expect their users to query the feed and how big of a deal missing entries is. There is also an extension to provide past articles in separate feed doucments [0] that was linked in this discussion but I have no idea if that is supported in practice.

[0] https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc5005

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

#248

Post by nathcd »

account42 wrote: post #243
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…

> 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 I have never had this problem. Do you have any example feeds you encounter this with? Are you sure its not just a bug in your reader? > 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 ava…

> I have never had this problem. Do you have any example feeds you encounter this with? Are you sure its not just a bug in your reader?

I mean, it's hard to say whether it's a bug in my reader, given that the RSS spec makes no mention of how relative links should work. I've variously used Newsbeuter, Newsboat, Newsblur, and The Old Reader and have never not had this problem.

(Edit: an example from this morning: Newsblur didn't know what to do with the footnote links in Dan Luu's blog [https://danluu.com/atom.xml]. Aside: Newsblur seems to be responding with 500s for about every other request today. sigh isn't technology wonderful?)

> Having RSS completely static means that hosting an RSS feed is super simple and does not require the increased attack potential of a dynamic service - something that the current federated web protocols completely fail at.

Pagination would work fine with static hosting. And "updates-since" requests wouldn't preclude static hosts from ignoring them and working exactly how they work now.

I agree with you about federated web protocols though - I'm pretty bummed ActivityPub requires an inbox, otherwise I think it would pretty much work with static hosting.

> I don't think creating a separate RSS-only web of links makes sense.

You're right, it doesn't really make sense. I think the crux of my frustration there is that we've got a syndication system that's bolted on top of the web, rather than properly integrated. It's probably the best that can be done though, without an entire separate hypertext system.

> Lots? Really? iframes are more dead than RSS, at least for anything outside of ads.

Youtube and Vimeo embeds are mostly where I see them.

>> or content that only makes sense with JS enabled

> Limiting RSS to static mostly-text content provides a lot of consistency.

I'm not complaining that feed items can't execute Javascript; I'm annoyed that sometimes the (textual) content of the post refers directly to other content that's only there after JS adds it. (I'm not blaming authors, this is just a problem of the content being written for a webpage and then being included in a different context. Again, an issue of the syndication system having been bolted onto the web.)

> Ugly, yes, but how is this a problem in practice? Just because it's not as hip as JSON?

No, I don't particularly love JSON either. XML does indeed work okay, but I pretty regularly (a couple times a year, maybe?) see broken feeds because of mis-escaped content. I think one of the feed generators of someone I follow produces bad CDATA tags too. Pretty hard to mess up JSON escaping (as much as HTML-in-JSON makes me shudder).

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

#249

Post by rendall »

shadowgovt wrote: post #231
rendall wrote: post #229

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Self-maintaining code is a very rare thing. In general, if they were truly seeing no uptake on it, they could just be justified removing it to decrease their security surface ( https://www.acunetix.com/vulnerabilities/web/wordpress-plugi... ). I'd have to know which NGO and what their circumstances are to have a more concrete opinion. With no additional information, I can construct a hypothetical scenario where a rea…

Ah, well, if you're talking a WordPress plug-in, well sure. I must confess I similarly look askance at the choice to use WordPress itself.
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