The problem with RSS today is that bad actors use it to scrape and rewrite content using AI.
Not having it enabled makes life harder for them since many are too lazy/not savvy enough to use other means to steal content.
I've been advocating for RSS support, and you should too
131–140 of 248 posts
Re: I've been advocating for RSS support, and you should too
#132While I use RSS, I think we need to recognize that it's slowly going away. Even a single publisher that's missing a feed will be a deal-breaker for any new adopters. And RSS is an over-complex solution anyway, designed for a time before web standards when sites all had spaghetti table layouts. Today there's no need to create a whole shadow site in fussily-formatted XML for what can usually be found in the page source…
At least for me, there is still benefit in being able to load only the list of articles. Attempting to fetch the full HTML and scrape it can be error prone and may not even work depending on how the site is using client-side rendering. Microformsts, which give us things like h-feed, are useful but the author is already thinking about the feed reader use case. Why wouldn't they also hook up an RSS feed?
The scraping issue is resolved by just putting the `h-feed` attributes on the relevant HTML elements. Far easier to implement and maintain than RSS. Maintaining a parallel XML endpoint is itself very error-prone, I know this from unpleasant experience. The only drawback to `h-feed` I can see is that the feed reader must fetch a larger initial payload. Seems like a small price to pay for much easier implementation and maintainability.
Re: I've been advocating for RSS support, and you should too
#133As a general PSA, youtube channels have an RSS feed to alert you when a favourite creator releases a new video. The form is https://www.youtube.com/feeds/videos.xml?channel_id=UC2wdo5v... where channel_id is the channel hash code which is buried in the source for the "nicely named" channel: https://www.youtube.com/@CuttingEdgeEngineering and can be found without source diving via (say) FeedBro (RSS browser extension)…
Somewhat related, but does anyone know how one can only get RSS for live videos?
Re: I've been advocating for RSS support, and you should too
#134RSS is great. Most blog engines support RSS by default. Podcasts typically use RSS (even if the app goes to great length to hide it). I sometimes wonder why there is so much push for "federation" and so few for... well just simple interoperable solutions that just require a client to connect to whatever server it wants with a well-known protocol.
> RSS is great. Most blog engines support RSS by default.
The people creating websites often don't know that they're providing RSS feeds though, and never link to it.
To solve that I developed a tool that finds RSS feeds, even if RSS autodiscovery isn't implemented: https://lighthouseapp.io/tools/feed-finder
Re: I've been advocating for RSS support, and you should too
#135Earlier quoted context omitted.
I guess you are vastly underestimating the complexity of parsing HTML and extracting the relevant information out of it. It might seem trivial nowadays, but it falls well within https://xkcd.com/1425/ territory if you take into account that the majority of web pages are basically producing non-spec conforming (X)HTML. And if you respond with "well, I don't care about the actual content, I just want to receive a notif…
Mozilla had half a billion dollars each year to work with, I am sure they could have figured something out if they cared. But hey, instead of fixing some HTML tags lets reinvent a completely new format and require every singe website on the planet to adopt that, that'll sure work out well...
A publisher does not want countless browsers scraping arbitrary web pages just to see if they’ve changed when they can instead offer a single lightweight end point specifically for content that is intended to be updated. If browsers started doing this scraping I can only imagine the arms race.
I can only see this happening as a service. A company crawls the web—probably a search company. Their LLM classifies changes. Their users can subscribe to individual sites or pages.
Even then there are downsides to publishers including loss of some tracking information and users spending less time on their sites being subjected to advertisements.
Re: I've been advocating for RSS support, and you should too
#136Earlier quoted context omitted.
God wouldn't that be simple and novel? Check a box when you bookmark a website and your browser polls it every so often for updates and gives you a little badge like a mobile app icon. No need for JS workers or push servers.
I wouldn't mind if browsers want to offer that feature in addition to RSS. But I also don't want to be forced to use my browser's bookmarking feature - RSS helps to decouple that.
I must be misunderstanding you. If this were possible standalone bookmark managers could do what standalone RSS readers do.
Re: I've been advocating for RSS support, and you should too
#137RSS is my main source of information. And I've built some RSS-related projects: 1. https://github.com/0x2E/fusion - A lightweight, self-hosted friendly RSS aggregator and reader 2. https://rawweb.org/ - A search engine for indie websites (the crawler collects data from RSS feeds) 3. https://github.com/0x2E/rss-finder - A tool for finding the RSS link of a website
Same for me, and would like to add my own list
1. https://lighthouseapp.io/ - feed reader combined with bookmarking
2. https://lighthouseapp.io/tools/feed-finder - tool to find RSS feeds (https://lighthouseapp.io/blog/deep-dive-finding-rss-feeds)
3. https://lighthouseapp.io/tools/newsletter-to-rss - tool to convert newsletters to RSS feeds
Re: I've been advocating for RSS support, and you should too
#138Speaking of advocating RSS, I was trying out Nikola [0] for static site generation and found that they have a really nice-looking RSS end-point [1] that is viewable both from the browser and an RSS reader. Looking into the XML, it turns out it's called xml-stylesheet: And I would argue that this is an excellent way to introduce new readers to RSS: instead of the browser popping up a download prompt, you can make your…
Man what a blast from the past. There was a moment in time where xml and xlst was considered the bright future of webapps
I remember writing a blog with xml + xslt and thought it was very cool.
Retrospectively, writing code in XML, eewwww, but back then I liked writing XHTML by hand
Re: I've been advocating for RSS support, and you should too
#139Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Most people also decide Most people didn't decide. Most people were tricked into using chrome. Most people are not computer literate.
That's fair. Though if I replaced "people" with "HN users" it would still hold true, and I would consider this group to be very computer literate.
Unfortunately, yes.
Re: I've been advocating for RSS support, and you should too
#140I recently added RSS to my personal site (https://www.tyleo.com/)
Even with a custom implementation it’s a simple thing to support. You can find the whole spec here: https://www.rssboard.org/rss-specification
I’ll mention that there is a competing Atom specification which is compatible with all notable RSS readers https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atom_(web_standard). The POV I’ve seen on HN favors Atom because it offers more functionality and is a clearer standard.
I want to voice my support for RSS though based on its simplicity. To me the feed doesn’t need a bunch of bells and whistles. I get analysis paralysis I get deciding which Atom features to support.