Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

I've been advocating for RSS support, and you should too

reedybear.bearblog.dev

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

141–150 of 248 posts

Re: I've been advocating for RSS support, and you should too

#141

Post by beretguy »

_Algernon_ wrote: post #76
beretguy wrote: post #61

Earlier 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.

[flagged]

I don't know, it's almost kind of like saying that newborn babies are illiterate by choice. Not everybody cares about computers or how to use them, they just want to find that restaurant address or read this news article or whatever. They don't have time or interest to learn how to use computers. I don't know how to replace transmission in my car. It's not by choice - I just don't have time and money to learn how to do that. Things take time and money to learn.

Re: I've been advocating for RSS support, and you should too

#143

Post by domysee »

fire_lake wrote: post #52

Question about the RSS spec: When pulling RSS, how do you know how often to poll? How do you know which items have been seen previously?

RSS actually has fields for it, but I've never seen it used.

https://www.rssboard.org/rss-specification#optionalChannelEl...

ttl, skipHours, skipDays

Source: working on a feed reader (https://lighthouseapp.io/) and feed finder tool (https://lighthouseapp.io/tools/feed-finder).

Re: I've been advocating for RSS support, and you should too

#144

Post by talideon »

One thing though: is you're adding "RSS" support, use Atom for the feed, not actual RSS. Everything supports Atom that supports RSS, it's no harder to implement, less ambiguous, less prone to breaking, and has a richer vocabulary that doesn't require you resort to pulling in additional vocabularies via namespaces.

I cringe every time I see a feed that uses RSS and then pulls in Atom for some of elements. If you're going to do that, then just use Atom for the whole thing rather than building a frankenfeed.

Re: I've been advocating for RSS support, and you should too

#145

Post by oneeyedpigeon »

tyleo wrote: post #140

I 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 off…

> You can find the whole spec here

There's also this version, which I believe is the original: https://cyber.harvard.edu/rss/rss.html

It's far from perfect, but at least it's not infested with spammy advertising.

Re: I've been advocating for RSS support, and you should too

#146

Post by pentagrama »

EvanAnderson wrote: post #78
defrost wrote: post #8

As 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)…

I worry about YouTube RSS feeds getting popular and Google killing them. Every time I see them discussed publicly I have this "Ssshh! Keep it on the down low!" reaction. I browse YouTube anonymously, have an ad blocker setup that pretty much eliminates all ads, and track my "subscriptions" with RSS. It's highly usable. I use a fork of tt-rss and actually embed the YouTube videos in the reader pane so I never see any…

Reading your comment this intro started sounding on my mind https://youtu.be/hnlIiDBFlEA

Re: I've been advocating for RSS support, and you should too

#147

Post by oneeyedpigeon »

pyromaker wrote: post #102

I absolutely love RSS format. It's one of the easiest ways for devs to get data and do something quickly with it. If you remember, Yahoo Pipies allowed devs & others quickly build something with RSS feeds. I've recently rebuilt and launched my own Yahoo Pipes clone https://www.mashups.io Along the way of building this tool, I came across a plenty of major websites that do not provide RSS feeds and indie devs who main…

I'm starting to do this more and more with the command line and actual pipes! You can go a long way with curl, xmllint, and the full Unix toolset.

Re: I've been advocating for RSS support, and you should too

#148

Post by talideon »

tyleo wrote: post #140

I 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 off…

Use whatever elements you need from Atom. Atom is a functional superset of RSS 2.0, and if you're hit with analysis paralysis, using only the functionality that exists in RSS 2.0 in your Atom feed.

Atom exists because RSS is ambiguous and prone to breakage. The "bells and whistles" exist only because there were a lot of common extensions at the time that made sense to fold into Atom itself. Even if you use none of that and just the bits that overlap with RSS 2.0, your feed will be less likely to break in random feed readers, and that's enough reason to use Atom over RSS.

In this day and age, there's no good reason to use RSS over Atom beyond brand recognition.

(Yes, I'm still salty from the feed wars of the 2000s, but I still stand by all that I've written above.)

Re: I've been advocating for RSS support, and you should too

#149

Post by n144q »

akvadrako wrote: post #70
oneeyedpigeon wrote: post #13

> Please advocate for more RSS support - especially with orgs you want to stay up-to-date with. Also advocate for support with browser manufacturers. It used to be good, then one of them dropped it and the others blindly followed. People clearly want the RSS button, why on earth not provide it?

I use RSS heavily and I don't want an RSS button - what would that even do? RSS is best when integrated with a stateful server-side reader. Whatever comes with the browser will not be as good as an extension from a company focused on that feature. For example I use https://www.inoreader.com/

> RSS is best when integrated with a stateful server-side reader.

Who said that? It's meaningful if you read the feed across multiple devices, but lots of people read RSS on their computer only.

And even so browsers could provide RSS status synchronization. In fact almost every browser is already syncing your browsing history, bookmarks and settings if you are signed in.

> Whatever comes with the browser will not be as good as an extension...

not true.

Re: I've been advocating for RSS support, and you should too

#150

Post by n144q »

dist-epoch wrote: post #95
beretguy wrote: post #61

Earlier 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.

When Chrome appeared HN was full of comments like "I switched all my family to Chrome, I recommend you do too".

Dude, that's completely irrelevant.

Most people switched from Internet Explorer.

Firefox was never the "mainstream" choice.

Post reply on HN